Beyond ideological conflict: religion and free-thought in the Belgian medical press (1840-1914) (IMPRESS)

IMPRESS will digitize and investigate a selection of major Belgian medical journals, issued between 1840 and 1914, which belong to the collection of the Royal Library of Belgium. The project will work towards two integrated aims to highlight the scientific potential of 19th-century medical heritage and stimulate future (digital) research. First, by digitizing a corpus of medical texts the project 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, free-thought and professional identities in 19th-century medicine. Combining insights and approaches from the fields of medical history, the history of religious and political ideas, gender studies and linguistics, the project will apply text mining and linguistic methods on a large volume of digitized medical journals. In line with the second objective, the project will reconsider the role and the later memory of ideological conflict in 19th-century Belgian medicine. The proposed project aims in this way to offer a well-informed historical perspective to actual debates in the fields of public health and bioethics in which religiously and/or philosophically inspired divides are at stake.