“This patient on account of domestic difficulty determined to destroy her life and for that purpose swallowed six cents worth of laudanum at 9 o’clock this evening.”
While this may sound like a period melodrama, it is actually a direct quote from an 1860 medical record from this very hospital, and is one of hundreds of such records that need to be transcribed for research.
Our Medical Center Archives staff is in the process of preserving and digitizing nineteenth-century medical records to make them more accessible for online research. A student from Cornell Tech is building a handwriting recognition system using modern machine learning techniques. The computer requires a “gold standard” of manually transcribed records to learn from.
The casebooks date back to 1808 and provide a unique perspective into the history of the institution and early New York City, as well as insight into its patients, diagnoses, and treatments recorded when our hospital and our country were still very young.
Where do you fit in?
ITS is looking for volunteers for our Transcribathons. These events will be held later this summer. Volunteers will access scans of original, handwritten medical records, and transcribe and edit them in Word documents. Designated event coordinators will be on hand to answer questions and provide guidance on how the transcriptions should be formatted.
Completed transcriptions will then go to our Archives team for review. Eventually, the documents will be available in digital format to the WCM community for historical research.
We already had one test run and it was a blast! There will be free food, fascinating stories, and fun challenges.
I’m interested in participating. How can I learn more?
Join our mailing list so we can keep you in the loop about this event.