Octavii Horatiani rerum medicarum libri quatuor . . . Albucasis chirurgicorum omnium primarii
Publisher Information: Strasbourg: Joannus Scotus, 1532.
[Abulcasis (936-1015.] [Priscianus, Theodorus (fl. 4th cent.)] Horatianus, Octavius. Rerum medicarum lib. quatuor . . . Albucasis [sic] chirurgicorum omniu[m] primarii, lib. tres . . . Folio. [8], 319pp. 8 full-page woodcuts by Hans Wechtlin (ca. 1480 – post 1526). Argentoratum [Strasbourg]: apud Joannem Schottum, 1532. 307 x 202 mm. Full paneled calf, gilt-lettered front cover in antique style. Library stamp removed from title, occasional spotting, but very good. Early ownership signature at the foot of the title; manuscript notes in what appears to be another early hand in the title margins.
Third Latin edition, first published in 1497 of three books of surgery from the Kitab al-Tasrif of Arabic physician Abu al-Qasim Khalaf ibn al-Abbas al-Zahrawi. Al-Zahrawi, whose first name was Latinized as Abulcasis or Albucasis, was the personal physician to Hakam II, Caliph of Córdoba in Muslim Spain; he ranks with ibn Sina (Avicenna) among the most important Arabic medical writers of the medieval period. His encyclopedia in thirty volumes, Kitab al-Tasrif (The art of healing), which took over 50 years to complete, was issued around the year 1000. The work’s last and most famous volume, on surgery, represents the first rational, complete and illustrated treatise on surgery and surgical instruments; it was translated into Latin by Gerard de Cremona in the 12th century and remained the leading European textbook on surgery for the next three hundred years.
The present edition contains three books from the Kitab al-Tasrif’s surgical volume, dealing with cauterization, incisions, bloodletting, wound treatment, fractures and dislocations. The book opens with a woodcut of the famous “Wound-Man” image illustrating roughly 30 different types of injury, together with the weapons and other instruments that cause them; other woodcuts depict surgical instruments. Preceding Abulcasis’s surgical treatise in this edition is the first edition of the Rerum medicarum by Theodorus Priscianus, a fourth-century Greek physician who lived in Constantinople. The four books of Theodorus’s treatise cover external and internal ailments, physiology and the diseases of women. Adams P-2119. Stillwell, The Awakening Interest in Science During the First Century of Printing, no. 532.
Book Id: 45940Price: $27,500.00