Following its mission and pursuing its past activity, the Institute is actively engaged in recovering the Greek medical legacy with a broad set of activities, ranging from preparing the digitization of manuscripts to publishing original studies that shed a new light on the unique contribution of Greece to world medicine.
The Vatican Library is among the most important repositories of ancient manuscripts in the world. It certainly is the most prestigious thanks to its collection of Greek medical manuscripts. Among them are one of the best preserved copies of the writings attributed to Hippocrates, a rare Byzantine album of botany with full-page representations of the plants, and, to mention just a few, notebooks recording the clinical experience of Byzantine physicians. IPMT CEO Emanuela Appetiti and Scientific Director Alain Touwaide met the Director of the Vatican Library, Msgr Cesare Pasini, to discuss a program of digitization of this invaluable treasure. They agreed to pursue the conversation and to study how to proceed, and Archaia/Nea will keep its readers appraised of the progress of this program.
Complementary, Alain Touwaide visited the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) at the University of California at Irvine, specializing in digitizing all Greek texts of Classical Antiquity and later that have reached us. With its Director, Professor Maria Pantelia, Touwaide discussed how the Institute can contribute to the activity of the TLG. Both agreed that the expertise of the Institute will usefully complement the activity, achievements and technical capacities of the TLG and will lead to a fruitful collaboration.
To enhance the understanding of the ancient Greek medical literature and foster its repurposing, Emanuela Appetiti and Alain Touwaide met for the second time with Dr George Thoma the Chief of the Communications Engineering Branch of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (National Library of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, MD). They analyzed how computer technology can be applied to massive quantities of images and information from ancient manuscripts and texts to automatically generate relevant information for the research of the Institute. Archaia/Nea will report any news.
