I will present the results of a collaborative and interdisciplinary project between the National Centre for Mining (NaCTeM) and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine ((CHSTM) at the University of Machester, demonstrating the capabilities of innovative text mining tools to allow the automatic extraction of information from two historical archives: the British Medical Journal (BMJ) (1840-present) and the London-area Medical Officer of Health (MOH) reports (1848-1972). NaCTeM's text mining tools have enriched these historical archives with semantic metadata automatically by extracting terms, named entities and events. The development of a semantic search system focused on the understanding of historical changes in lung diseases since 1840.