Precedents

Obviously, each of them had different motivations. Rodrigo Pertegàs, Comenge and Roca were sons of the Renaixença, a cultural and political project that, among other good contributions, had this interest in documents, heavily inspired by positivism, which survives in Cardoner. On the other hand, García Ballester and McVaugh belonged to a generation of researchers associated with the university who had become professional students of the history of medicine, in the medieval period especially. Together they conceived and initiated a systematic programme of searching for documents in the historical archives all over the territories that had once been part of the Crown of Aragon (excluding the Italic ones). Dozens of documentary deposits were visited, searched and copied, side-by-side whenever possible, and they were sometimes virtually the first scholars to have taken an interest in them for many decades. They visited every corner of Catalonia, Aragon, Valencia and Majorca with an unquenchable thirst for information that would help to gain a better understanding of the link between the practice of medicine and the theory that inspired it.  

This research programme, which could never be exhaustive, was not limited to the personal efforts of McVaugh and García Ballester; they had the possibility of attracting disciples who, starting with their PhD work, have continued this task of searching for documents. Some of the people behind MedCat are indebted to their teaching, while others, although not students of theirs, have decided to become involved in it, working on subjects which historiographical interest they contributed more than anyone to reviving. In fact, the idea of constructing a digitized Corpus Medicorum Catalanorum, with this name, first occurred to Luis García Ballester when the possibilities of the digital Humanities were just beginning to be understood, but this was one of so many projects that were left hanging in the air after his death.