January 10, 2004
Technology and the Medieval Manuscript
Technology in Psychiatry can take many forms and variations. It can include the impact of handheld computers in a clinical environment, the ability of an EMR to provide proper medication alerts, the computer-human interface, an automated diagnostic program and many other interesting and exciting aspects. Technology does not always mean computer, although the boundaries are certainly blurring as we become more digital. Can it help make a differential diagnosis between the fanciful writings of a medieval manic vs a brilliant scientific codex?
A fascinating story in The Economist describes how the latest technology has been applied to solve the history and translation of a very unusual document - the Voynich manuscript.
In 1912, the antiquarian book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich bought a number of mediaeval manuscripts from an undisclosed location in Europe. Among these was a lavishly illustrated manuscript codex of 234 pages, written in an unknown script with unusual illustrations. According to the manuscript's history, no one has been able to decipher the manuscript and many have tried from the 1600's to today. Eminent cryptographers and cryptanalysts have attempted but it still remains a mystery.
The manuscirpt is written in an elegant, but otherwise unknown script and almost all pages contain illustrations. It is about 1.5 inches thick and has a blank limp vellum cover that does not contain any indication of age, authorship or origin. The manuscript would appear to be a scientific book. 
The illustrations are mostly herbal with other sections that are astronomical and so-called cosmological drawings and also some odd, perhaps anatomical, drawings including pipes and tubes resembling blood vessels, together with human figures, mostly nude females, similar to ones in the astrological section.
Some suggest that the book is an elaborate hoax, or undecipherable scribblings of a madman.There have been suggestions that Voynichese is a modified form of Chinese. Others think it may be Ukrainian with the vowels taken out. But Voynichese words do not resemble those of any known language. 
Nor is the text a simple transliteration into fanciful symbols: the internal structure of Voynichese words, and how they fit together in sentences, is unlike patterns seen in other languages. One scholar even suggests that it may have been written by an 8 year old Leonardo daVinci.
In a paper published in the January issue of Cryptologia, Gordon Rugg, a computer scientist at Keele University, in England, thinks he may be one step closer to an explanation of how the text might have been created. He used a grid of 40 rows and 39 columns to create a table which he filled in with Voynichese syllables. He then placed a grille, a piece of cardboard with three squares cut out in a diagonal pattern,on top of the table, and started forming words by reading off the syllables as he moved the grille across columns and down rows. The result was words with the same internal patterns as Voynichese. Dr Rugg and his team are now writing software to create dozens of tables and grilles in an attempt to reproduce other linguistic patterns in the manuscript. If their findings hold up, it would mean that the regularity of Voynichese is no longer an argument against the manuscript being an elaborate hoax. There is hope that this research will result in a new style of computer programming with powerful possibilities.
As the Economist article suggests, "most people expect to find a work of modest historical interest, rather than the secret of life. As with most puzzles, the thrill of solution lies in the process, rather than the product."
The manuscript currently resides at the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale.