King George III life and reign were longer than those of any previous monarch.
This reign covered the period of Great Britain defeating France in the Seven
Years War and becoming the dominant European power in North America and India;
the loss of Britain’s colonies in America in the American Revolutionary War; and concluded in
the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Throughout his reign George III suffered from recurrent episodes of mental
illness, and in the later part of his life mental deterioration was to become
a more permanent feature. The story of his struggle with mental illness was
made into a successful 1994 film the Madness of King
George. This film depicts the relatively primitive medical practices of the
time and the effort that his doctors made in understanding the human body.
Modern medicine has suggested that the symptoms were the result of metabolic
blood disorder known as porphyria and chemical analysis of his hair have
revealed that his problems were compounded by arsenic poisoning. This arsenic
poisoning may have been as a result of the medicines prescribed to treat his
mental illness being contaminated with arsenic.
Scientists at St Georges, University of London, in collaboration
with historians in collaboration with historians from Universities of
Birmingham and Southampton, are seeking new insights into the progressive
nature of his mental illness by computer analysis of his letters. This analysis
is expected to shed new light on the time, course and duration of King George's
deteriorating mental symptoms. The research team is using detailed texts
between the King and the prime ministers of the time; these texts vary in
length from just a few lines to much longer. Letters from, before and after his
known periods of illness and derangement will be compared. The sophisticated
software used in this computational linguistics approach will identify textual
abnormalities that are seen in patients with mental illness. These include measures
of organisation and coherence in the use of language that emerge from
statistical modelling of words and sentence meaning. The work was featured in
the BBC Series “Fit to
Rule” which deals with the impact of medical conditions on the history of
Royal Households through the ages.
To enable the computers to carry out work effectively the
text must be structured in a particular way for the software to work properly.
Max was tasked with scanning many hundreds of letters from books published in
the 18th Century and then carrying out optical character recognition
of the text.
Lord North—I
am so desirous that every man in my service that can with propriety take part
in the Debate on Tuesday, should speak, that I desire You will very strongly
press Sir Gilbert Elliott and any others that have not taken in the last
Session so forward a part as their abilities make them capable of, and I have
no objection to Your adding that I have particularly directed You to speak to
them on this occasion
Max uses a sophisticated OCR system based around Abbyy
Recognition server. Despite the high levels of accuracy that we achieve
with our system it is inevitable that aberrations will occur. Once the OCR
output was created our editors carried out a proofreading to publication
service (or ‘POP’ service) to eliminate all ‘false line breaks’ extraneous
characters or remove incorrectly spelt words to create a ‘pristine’ copy of the
original text ready for inputting into the systems at St Georges University of
London.
This important study is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and will the first time that
computational linguistics techniques will be used to analyse large volumes of
correspondence dating from the 18th Century.
For information about the research project contact Dr Peter
Garrard at the Neuroscience department of St
Georges University of London
