Fasciculus medicine in quo continentur...
Publisher Information: Venice: Joannes & Gregorius de Gregoriis, 1495.
Ketham, Johannes de (fl. 1460)] Fasciculus medicine in quo continentur . . . [Includes: Mondino de Lucci (Mundinus) (ca. 1270-1326). Anathomia.] [40]ff., unpaginated. 10 full-page woodcut text illustrations. [Venice: Joannes & Gregorius de Gregoriis, de Forlivio, 15 October 1495 (colophon)]. [Bound with:] Savonarola, Giovanni Michele (d. 1462/64). De omnibus mundi balneis. xxxv ff. [Venice: Cristofero de Pensis de Mandello, 20 November (1496) (colophon)]. Together 2 items in 1, folio. 291 x 198 mm. Replica binding of limp vellum, linen ties, by Bernard Middleton; in full morocco folding box by Sangorski & Sutcliffe (spine of box faded, some scratches on box). Faint foxing and toning, a few woodcuts slightly trimmed, but very good. The Haskell F. Norman copy.
Second Latin edition of the Ketham; third edition of the Savonarola. Fasciculus medicine is a collection of short medical treatises, some dating as far back as the thirteenth century, which circulated widely in manuscript before the Forlivio brothers issued the editio princeps from their Venetian press in 1491. “Johannes de Ketham can be convincingly identified as Hans von Kircheim of Swabia, fl. 1455-1470, professor of medicine in Vienna, who used this collection for his lectures and recommended it to his pupils. This collection of texts was in circulation by 1400” (ISTC).
The 1491 first edition of the Ketham was the first printed medical book to have anatomical illustrations of any kind. It was followed by an Italian translation published in 1493/94, which added Mondino’s Anathomia to the collection; for this Italian edition, all but one of the illustrations were redrawn and four new outline wood-engravings added showing scenes of medical practice in fifteenth-century Venice. These dramatically improved and more realistic illustrations, which were reproduced in the numerous later editions, are by an unknown artist about whom there has been much speculation; he was certainly close to the school of Bellini. The woodcuts for the Italian edition were used again in the present second Latin edition, with one exception: The original block for the dissection scene preceding Mondino’s anatomy was presumably lost or destroyed, and was replaced in this edition with an inferior copy.
It is in the woodcuts prepared for the Italian edition that we see the first evidence of the transition from medieval to modern anatomical illustration. In the 1491 edition, the woodcut of the female viscera—like those of the Zodiac Man, Bloodletting Man, Wound-Man, etc.—was derived from the traditional non-representational squatting figure found in medieval medical manuscripts. However, the illustrations for the Italian edition “included an entirely redesigned figure showing female anatomy . . . The scholastic figure from 1491 must have irritated the eyes of the artistic Venetians to such a degree that they immediately abandoned it. After this the female figure actually sits in an armchair, so that the traditional [squatting] position corresponds to a real situation” (Herrlinger, p. 66). British Museum Catalogue V, p. 347. Garrison-Morton.com 363, 363.1. Herrlinger, History of Medical Illustration, pp. 28-29; 65-66. Norman 1211 (The copy was rebound after the Norman sale.) ISTC ik00014000.
This copy is bound with a 1496 edition of Giovanni Savonarola’s De omnis mundi balneis, an account of the medicinal properties and uses of baths. The first edition this work, published in Ferrara in 1485 under the title De balneis et thermis naturalibus omnibus Italiae, was the second printed work on balneology. Savonarola, one of the leading physicians of the fifteenth century, took a skeptical approach to the subject, relying on his own observations and rejecting the notion that baths owed their virtues to occult or supernatural properties. Included in his work is the first recorded instance of a clock being used to regulate an actual, purposive experiment—in this case, a comparison of the water temperatures of two Italian hot springs. British Museum Catalogue V, p. 470 ISTC is00292000. Norman 1896. See Garrison-Morton.com 14113.
Book Id: 50677Price: $75,000.00