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Darrera modificació: 2024-06-27
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Zipser, Barbara - Lardos, Andreas - Lazarou, Rebecca - Allkin, Robert - Nesbitt, Mark - Scott, Andrew C., "Interpreting materia medica. A case study on Ioannes Archiatrus [version 2; peer review: 3 approved]", Wellcome Open Res, 8 (2024), 502.
- Resum
- Background
Premodern medical texts are an invaluable source for scholars from humanities and sciences. However, they are usually not accessible as few scientists with an interest in premodern materia medica are also qualified philologists. Therefore, a balance has to be struck to translate these texts while preserving information on how reliable we believe a given translation to be. In this paper, we conduct a case study on the vernacular version of Ioannes archiatrus.
Methods
The present study forms part of the output of a multidisciplinary Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award combining humanities and sciences. We deployed a multi-layer tagging system to systematise pharmaceutical terminology and to translate these terms while providing confidence factors for individual words. In a second step, we used AntConc, a freeware concordance software, to analyse our primary source and visualise patterns in the text.
Results
Our methodology created a readable text that made it possible for the reader to check confidence factors. It also allows our translation and tagging to be recycled for further research.
Conclusions
Our methods provide a tool that allows to balance the need to translate and the necessary caution about translated plant and mineral names. Our approach is transferable and it can be modified to suit the needs of other primary sources.
Ancient and medieval medical texts often describe pharmaceutical treatments. These are of particular interest to modern pharmaceutical research, as they may be effective. But we are often unable to tell what precisely the plant and mineral names in these texts mean.
Our article provides a methodology for the evaluation of this ancient and medieval pharmaceutical terminology. We also provide a case study of a 13th century medical text to demonstrate what our methodology would look like in practice.
- Matèries
- Medicina - Farmacologia
- URL
- https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/8-502/v2
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