History and stories: valorization of the documentary heritage of a former psychiatric hospital
Abstract
Historical archives of former psychiatric hospitals are valuable cultural heritage that needs to be preserved and valorized through tools that facilitate consultation of their content. They could contribute to understanding the evolution of psychiatric practices, linguistics aspects of the domain’s specialized terminology and societal attitudes towards mental health problems and institutionalized patients. This paper deals with the medical records preserved in the historical archive of the former psychiatric hospital of Girifalco in Calabria, Italy, focusing on its digitization and the creation of support tools for easy consultation. The work highlights the challenges faced with the transcription of handwritten documents. The digitized medical records are valuable research sources and offer insight into the lives and stories of the patients. In particular, the analysis of the terminology used in the medical records revealed linguistic and historical insights. The digitized documents are archived and available online for further research.
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