The project "IMPRESS: Beyond ideological conflict: religion and free-thought in the Belgian medical press (1840-1914)" will work towards two integrated aims to highlight the scientific potential of 19th-century medical heritage and stimulate future (digital) research.

The project "IMPRESS: Beyond ideological conflict: religion and free-thought in the Belgian medical press (1840-1914)" will work towards two integrated aims to highlight the scientific potential of 19th-century medical heritage and stimulate future (digital) research.

First, researchers will digitize a corpus of three important Belgian medical journals, issued between 1840 and 1914 (Bulletin de l’Académie Royale de Médecine de Belgique; Journal de Médecine, de Chirurgie et de Pharmacologie; Journal des Sciences Médicales de Louvain). This aims to serve as a test case and methodological model for both the digitization and the digital analysis of historical scientific texts.

Secondly, interdisciplinary PhD research into these medical journals will focus on ideological conflict, and more in particular on the role of religion and free-thought in 19th-century medicine. Combining insights and approaches from the fields of medical history, the history of religious and political ideas, and linguistics, the researchers will use text mining and linguistic methods.

The project gathers together teams from KULeuven, KBR  and ULB (Cécile Vanderpelen, Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions and Secularism, Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences).

End of the project: 15/4/2021

Dates
Created on August 29, 2018