From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Medicine Timeline

One of the oldest known ancient Mesopotamian medical texts is a collection of 15 prescriptions, written in Sumerian, on a clay tablet, which dates from the Ur III period, or Sumerian Renaissance. It was excavated at the site of the ancient city of Nippur in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), and is preserved in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

On May 29, 2009 a reproduction of this tablet, illustrated at this link, was available from the museum shop. The description of that reproduction dated the tablet to 2400 BCE.   

The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus (also Kahun Papyrus, Kahun Medical Papyrus, or UC 32057) is the oldest known medical text on papyrus. It was found at El-Lahun by Flinders Petrie in 1889  and first translated by F. Ll. Griffith in 1893 and published in The Petrie Papyri: Hieratic Papyri from Kahun and Gurob.

The papyrus concerns women's complaints—gynaecological diseases, fertility, pregnancy, and contraception. "The text is divided into thirty-four sections, each section dealing with a specific problem and containing diagnosis and treatment, no prognosis is suggested. Treatments are non surgical, comprising applying medicines to the affected body part or swallowing them. The womb is at times seen as the source of complaints manifesting themselves in other body parts."

The Code of Hammurabi  is the best-preserved ancient law code. It was enacted by the sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, and inscribed on stelae displayed in temples around the Babylonian Empire. Of these only one example survives, inscribed on a seven foot, four inch tall basalt stone slab or stele, preserved in the Louvre.

"The stele containing the Code of Hammurabi was discovered in 1901 by the Egyptologist Gustav Jéquier, a member of the expedition headed by Jacques de Morgan. The stele was discovered in what is now Khūzestān, Iran (ancient Susa, Elam), where it had been taken as plunder by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte in the 12th century BC. . . .

"At the top of the stele is a bas-relief image of a Babylonian god (either Marduk or Shamash), with the king of Babylon presenting himself to the god, with his right hand raised to his mouth as a mark of respect.[1] The text covers the bottom portion with the laws written in Akkadian language cuneiform script. The text has been broken down by translators into 282 laws, but this division is arbitrary, since the original text contains no divisional markers" (Wikipedia article on Code of Hammurabi, accessed 02-04-2009).

The Code of Hammurabi applied to medical practice as it mentioned "fees payable to a physician following successful treatment; these varied according to the station of the patient. Similarly, the punishment for the failure of an operation is set out. At least this shows that in Babylon 4000 years ago the medical professional had advanced far enough in public esteeem to warrant the payment of adequate fees" (J. Norman [ed], Morton's Medical Bibliography 5th ed [1991] no. 1).

On 02-04-2009 I was able to access a special video and sound presentation in English on the Code of Hammurabi stele from the Louvre website at this link.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus, the most detailed and sophisticated of the extant medical papyri, is the only surviving copy of part of an ancient Egyptian textbook on trauma surgery, and the world's oldest surgical treatise. Written in the hieratic script of the ancient Egyptian language,  it is based on material from a thousand years earlier. It consists of a list of 48 traumatic injury cases, with a description of the physical examination, treatment and prognosis of each. When the papyrus was discovered it was about 15 feet long in roll or scroll form. Sometime in the 19th century it was cut into 17 columns. It is preserved in the New York Academy of Medicine.

"The text begins by addressing injuries to the head, and continues with treatments for injuries to neck, arms and torso, where the text breaks off. Among the treatments are closing wounds with sutures (for wounds of the lip, throat, and shoulder), preventing and curing infection with honey and mouldy bread, and stopping bleeding with raw meat. Immobilisation was often advised for head and spinal cord injuries, which is still in practice today in the short-term treatment of some injuries. The use of magic for treatment is resorted to in only one case (Case 9).

"The papyrus also describes anatomical observations in exquisite detail. It contains the first known descriptions of the cranial sutures, the meninges, the external surface of the brain, the cerebrospinal fluid, and the intracranial pulsations. The papyrus shows that the heart, vessels, liver, spleen, kidneys, ureters and bladder were recognized, and that the blood vessels were known to be connected to the heart. Other vessels are described, some carrying air, some mucus, while two to the right ear are said to carry the breath of life, and two to the left ear the breath of death. The physiological functions of organs and vessels remained a complete mystery to the ancient Egyptians."

♦ You can scroll through a virtual scroll of the Edwin Smith papyrus on the website of the National Library of Medicine at http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/flash/smith/smith.html. When you click on the text button on the site you see the new translation of that portion of the papyrus made by James P. Allen of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Because of the durability of clay tablets relative to the fragility of papyrus more original source material regarding Mesopotamian medicine survived than from ancient Greece or Rome. The quantity and quality of medical documents from ancient Egypt are more difficult to compare to Mesopotamian records than those of Greece or Rome, since, in addition to the medical papyri which survived in the hospitable climate of Egypt, Egyptian mummies represent a unique source of paleopathological information.

The surviving Mesopotamian medical records consist of roughly 1000 cuneiform tablets, of which 660 medical tablets from the library of Ashurbanipal are preserved in the British Museum. About 420 tablets from other sites also survived, including the library excavated from the private house of a medical practitioner (an asipu) from Neo-Assyrian Assur, and some Middle Assyrian and Middle Babylonia texts.

Most of these Mesopotamian medical tablets were not discovered until the nineteenth century, and because of difficulties with translation of cuneiform script, many of these tablets were not understood by scholars until recently. Another factor that must be taken into consideration is that since these tablets survived by unintended burial rather than by manuscript copying, and they were not preserved until comparatively recently in conventional libraries or museums, the medicine they record did not necessarily play a conventional role in the Western medical tradition. What influence their contents might have had on the practice of later physicians remains unclear.

The medical texts from Ashurbanipal's library were first transliterated and published in facsimile by Reginald Campbell Thompson as Assyrian Medical Texts. From the Originals in the British Museum (1923). Franz Kocher later published six volumes called  Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen (1963-1980), the first four volumes of which contain the tablets found from sites other than Assurbanipal's library. "The remaining two volumes of Kocher's work augment Campbell Thompson, providing new joins of broken fragments and much material uncovered in the British Museum. At least one more volume of Nineveh texts has been announced. In addition, the series Spaet Babylonische Texte aus Uruk contains some 30 medical texts not included in Kocher's work. The vast majority of these tablets are prescriptions, but there are a few series of tablets that contained entries that were directly related to one another, and these have been labeled 'treatises' " (Nancy Demand, The Asclepion, accessed 05-30-2009).

More recently the texts of many of the Mesopotamian medical tablets were translated and analyzed from the medical point of view by  Assyriologist/cuneiformist, JoAnn Scurlock and physician/medical historian Burton R. Anderson as Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine (2005).

•The largest surviving medical treatise from ancient Mesopotamia is known as the Treatise of Medical Diagnosis and Prognoses.

"The text of this treatise consists of 40 tablets collected and studied by the French scholar R. Labat. Although the oldest surviving copy of this treatise dates to around 1600 BCE, the information contained in the text is an amalgamation of several centuries of Mesopotamian medical knowledge. The diagnostic treatise is organized in head to toe order with separate subsections covering convulsive disorders, gynecology and pediatrics. It is unfortunate that the antiquated translations available at present to the non-specialist make ancient Mesopotamian medical texts sound like excerpts from a sorceror's handbook. In fact, as recent research is showing, the descriptions of diseases contained in the diagnostic treatise demonstrate a keen ability to observe and are usually astute. Virtually all expected diseases can be found described in parts of the diagnostic treatise, when those parts are fully preserved, as they are for neurology, fevers, worms and flukes, VD and skin lesions. The medical texts are, moreover, essentially rational, and some of the treatments, as for example those designed for excessive bleeding (where all the plants mentioned can be easily identified), are essentially the same as modern treatments for the same conditions" (Nancy Demand, The Aesclepion, accessed 05-30-2009).

Written in Hieratic, the 110 page Papyrus Ebers is the most extensive surviving record of ancient Egyptian medicine.  "It contains many incantations meant to turn away disease-causing demons and there is also evidence of a long tradition of empirical practice and observation.

"The papyrus contains a treatise on the heart. It notes that the heart is the center of the blood supply, with vessels attached for every member of the body. The Egyptians seem to have known little about the kidneys and made the heart the meeting point of a number of vessels which carried all the fluids of the body — blood, tears, urine and sperm.

"Mental disorders are detailed in a chapter of the papyrus called the Book of Hearts. Disorders such as depression and dementia are covered. The descriptions of these disorders suggest that Egyptians conceived of mental and physical diseases in much the same way.

"The papyrus contains chapters on contraception, diagnosis of pregnancy and other gynaecological matters, intestinal disease and parasites, eye and skin problems, dentistry and the surgical treatment of abscesses and tumors, bone-setting and burns."

Edwin Smith, who also owned the Edwin Smith Papyrus, bought the Ebers Papyrus in 1862. It was said to have been found between the legs of a mummy in the Assassif district of the Theban necropolis. It remained in Smith's collection until at least 1869 when it was offered for sale in the catalog of an antiquities dealer, described as "a large medical papyrus in the possession of Edwin Smith, an American farmer of Luxor." It was purchased in 1872 by the German Egyptologist and novelist Georg Ebers, and is preserved in the University of Leipzig Library.

A fragment of a papyrus on diseases of the anus and magical incantations against headaches, The Chester Beatty Medical papyrus was written in the 13th-12th centuries BCE in hieratic script.

In an effort to collect all knowledge, Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria during these years, collected a library at Nineveh, of 20,000–30,000 clay tablets written in cuneiform script. 

"Ashurbanipal was one of the few Assyrian kings to have been trained the scribal arts — by one Balasî , a senior royal scholar " (Robson, "The Clay Tablet Book," Eliot & Rose (eds) A Companion to the History of the Book [2007] 75).

"Recent cataloguing in the British Museum has enumerated some 3,700 scholarly tablets from Ashurbanipal's Library written in Babylonian script and Dialect — about 13 percent of the entire library. Ashurbanipal's obsession with Babylonian books did not, then, completely overwhelm indigenous production, but he did view them as highly valuable cultural capital; their forced removal to Nineveh undermined Babylonian claims to the intellectual heritage of the region and thus pretensions to political hegemony, while reinforcing Ashurbanipal's own self-image as guardian of Mesopotamian culture and power" (Robson, op. cit., 77).

The library was discovered at Nineveh by Austen Henry Layard in 1849, and is considered the earliest systematically collected library, as distinct from a government archive.  It is thought that a significant portion of the library survived to the present because the clay tablets were baked in fires set during the Median sack of Nineveh in 612 CE.

To deter thieves, Ashurbanipal had the following curse written on many of his tablets. It is the earliest known book curse:

“I have transcribed upon tablets the noble products of the work of the scribe which none of the kings who had gone before me had learned, together with the wisdom of Nabu insofar as it existeth [in writing]. I have arranged them in classes, I have revised them and I have placed them in my palace, that I, even I, the ruler who knoweth the light of Ashur, the king of the gods, may read them. Whosoever shall carry off this tablet, or shall inscribe his name on it, side by side with mine own, may Ashur and Belit overthrow him in wrath and anger, and may they destroy his name and posterity in the land" (Drogin, Anathema! [1983] 52-53).

The surviving portion of the library includes 660 cuneiform tablets that concern medicine. These were published in facsimile for the first time by Reginald C. Thompson as Assyrian Medical Texts. From the Originals in the British Museum (1923).

The Mawangdui Silk Texts (Chinese: 馬王堆帛書; pinyin: Mǎwángduī Bóshū), texts of Chinese philosophical and medical works written on silk, were found buried in Tomb no. 3 at Mawangdui, in the city of Changsha, Hunan, China in 1973. 

"They include the earliest attested manuscripts of existing texts such as the I Ching, two copies of the Tao Te Ching, one similar copy of Strategies of the Warring States and a similar school of works of Gan De and Shi Shen. Scholars arranged them into silk books of 28 kinds. Together they count to about 120,000 words covering military strategy, mathematics, cartography and the six classical arts of ritual, music, archery, horsemanship, writing and arithmetic" (Wikipedia article on Mawangdui Silk Texts, accessed 01-31-2010).

Most of the Mawangdui Silk Texts are preserved in the Hunan Provincial Museum.

Roman physician Claudius Galen of Pergamon writes two classified bibliographies of his own writings: Peri ton idion biblion [Latin: De Libris propriis liber, On his own writings] and Peri tes taxeos ton idion biblion [Latin: De ordine librorum suorum liber, On the arrangement of his own writings].

These are the first auto-bibliographical works which survived, and they may also be considered the first bibliographies of any kind which survived after the listings from the library of Alexandria by Kallimachos (Callimachus), which survived only in the most fragmentary form.

"The De libris propriis liber opens with a general introduction, in which Galen refers to the books falsely attributed to him. The main text is dvided into seventeen chapters, in which Galen arranges his works under such headings as commentaries, anatomical works, Hippocratic writings, works on moral philosophy, grammar and rhetoric, and so on. This bibliography apparently did not suffice as a guide to the five hundred or so works Galen had put out (many of them now lost), for he added a second one. This is the De ordine librorum suorum liber, of which second bibliography unfortunately only a fragment has come down to us" (Besterman, The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography 2nd ed (1940) 3, nos. I & II).

Galen's bibliographies were first published in Part IV, ff.**1-6, of the editio princeps of his collected writings in Greek issued by the heirs of Aldus Manutius and Aldus's father-in-law, Andreas Asulanus, in 1525. They were revised and improved by Conrad Gessner in 1562, as noticed in this database.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 2.

Oxyrhyncus Papyrus 2547 is a fragment of the Hippocratic oath written in Greek in Egypt about 275 CE. It is preserved in the Wellcome Institute Library, London (WMS 5724). 

Conrad et al, The Western Medical Tradition 800 BC to AD 1800 (1995) Fig. 3, p. 21.

The "Oslo Papyrus" (P.Oslo 1 1), a magical papyrus roll about 8.3 feet long, written in 12 columns on the recto and transversa charta on the verso, and consisting of magical recipes especially for love magic, is "the most richly illustrated Greek papyrus" (Diringer).  Seven of its columns of text are illustrated by figures of the demons invoked.  The illustration is done in the Egyptian style. The papyrus also includes "a remedy to prevent conception, the only one that exists in the world." 

The papyrus was donated to the University of Oslo by S. Eitrem in the 1930s, as part of a collection of 329 papyri and fragments from Karanis and Theodelphia which he purchased from dealers in Cairo and the Faiyum.

"It may, therefore be argued that even if we have not sufficient evidence to show that the Greek art of book illustration descended from the Egyptian, there can be no doubt that the latter had a strong influence on the origin and development of the Greek ornamentation and illustration of books. In Weitzmann's opinion, the so-called papyrus style probably originated in pre-Hellenistic Egypt and was only adapted and further developed by the Greeks; furthermore 'Alexandria was probably the actual centre which provided the facilities for the development of roll illustration as a new branch of Greek art.'

"There is no evidence, however, that 'illumination' of books was practised in ancient Greece or Rome on a large scale. Indeed the earliest preserved MSS, are free from ornamentation, and the earliest codices extant show a minumum of colour" (Diringer, The Illuminated Book: Its History & Production [1967] 29-30).

The Johnson Papyrus (London, Wellcome Library, MS 5753) is a fragment of an early 5th century Greek codex written in Egypt, containing the oldest extant book illustrations of plants. It was discovered by J. da M. Johnson, in 1904 while he was working in Antinoe, Egypt. Johnson later became Printer to the University of Oxford.

One side of the papyrus shows a sphere of dark blue-green leaves supported by some small scraggly roots. Below the illustration is a fragment of Greek text. The illustrated plant has been identified as  comfrey, symphytum officinale. The reverse side shows "phlommos, perhaps mullein" (Conrad, et al, The Western Medical Tradition 800 BC to AD 1800 [1995] Fig. 10, p. 10).

Both sides of the papyrus fragment are illustrated in color in Ford, Images of Sciences. A History of Scientific Illustration (1993) 23.

The oldest surviving copy of Pedanus Dioscorides's treatise on medical botany and pharmacology, De Materia Medica, is an illuminated Byzantine manuscript produced about 512 CE. The manuscript also contains the earliest illustrated treatise on ornithology. It is one of the earliest surviving relatively complete codices of a scientific text, one of the earliest relatively complete illustrated codices on any scientific subject, and arguably the most beautiful of the earliest surviving scientific codices. It also contains what are probably the earliest surviving portraits of scientists or physicians in a manuscript.

The manuscript was produced for the Byzantine princess Anicia Juliana, the daughter of Flavius Anicius Olybrius, who had been emperor of the western empire in 472 CE.  "The frontispiece of the manuscript features her depiction, the first donor portrait in the history of manuscript illumination, flanked by the personifications of Magnanimity and Prudence, with an allegory of the "Gratitude of the Arts" prostrate in front of her. The encircling inscription proclaims Juliana as a great patron of art" (Wikipedia article on Anicia Juliana, accessed 11-22-2008).

For this and other commissions Juliana  may be considered the first non-reigning patron of the arts in recorded history.

"Splendid though the figures in the Codex Vindobonensis are, they reveal a naturalism so alien to contemporary Byzantine art that it is obvious that they were not drawn from nature but derived from originals of a much earlier date—as early, at least, as the second century AD. They vary, however, very much in quality and are clearly not all by the same hand, possibly not even all after the work of a single artist. In the text accompaying eleven of them there is association with the writings of Krateuas. All these figures are admirable, and clearly by the same hand; it must therefore seem certain that they, at all events, are derived from drawings by Krateuas himself" (Blunt & Raphael, The Illustrated Herbal [1979] 17).

The story of the manuscript's survival is relatively well documented:

"Presented in appreciation for her patronage in the construction of a district church in Constantinople, the parchment codex comprises 491 folios (or almost a thousand pages) and almost four hundred color illustrations, each occupying a full page facing a description of the plant's pharmacological properties. . . .

"In the Anicia codex, the chapter entries of De Materia Medica have been rearranged, the plants alphabetized and their descriptions augmented with observations from Galen and Crateuas (Krateuas), whose own herbal probably had been illustrated. Five supplemental texts also were appended, including paraphrases of the Theriaca and Alexipharmaca of Nicander and the Ornithiaca of Dionysius of Philadelphia (first century AD), which describes more than forty Mediterranean birds, including one sea bird shown with its wings both folded and open" (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/aconite/materiamedica.html, accessed 11-22-2008)

From the time of its creation "Nearly nine centuries were to pass before we have further knowledge of the whereabouts of the codex. Then we learn that in 1406 it was being rebound by a certain John Chortasmenos for Nathanael, a monk and physician in the Prodromos Monastery in Constantinople, where seveteen years later it was seen by a Sicilian traveler named Aurispa. After the Muslim conquest of the city in 1453 the codex fell into the hands of the Turks, and Turkish and Arabic names were then added to the Greek. A century later it was in the possession of a Jew named Hamon, body physician to Suleiman the Magnificent, and it was presumably either by Hamon or by his son, who inherited it, that Hebrew names were also added" (Blunt & Raphael, op. cit., 15).

"Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I to the Ottoman court of Süleyman, attempted to purchase the Anicia codex in 1562 but could not afford the asking price. As he relates at the end of his Turkish Letters (IV, p.243),

"One treasure I left behind in Constantinople, a manuscript of Dioscorides, extremely ancient and written in majuscules, with drawings of the plants and containing also, if I am not mistaken, some fragments of Crateuas and a small treatise on birds. It belongs to a Jew, the son of Hamon, who, while he was still alive, was physician to Soleiman. I should like to have bought it, but the price frightened me; for a hundred ducats was named, a sum which would suit the Emperor's purse better than mine. I shall not cease to urge the Emperor to ransom so noble an author from such slavery. The manuscript, owing to its age, is in a bad state, being externally so worm-eaten that scarcely any one, if he saw if lying in the road, would bother to pick it up.

"In 1569 Emperor Maximilian II did acquire the Anicia codex for the imperial library in Vienna, now the Austrian National Library (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek), where it is designated Codex Vindobonensis Med. Gr. 1. (from Vindobona, the Latin name for Vienna) or, more simply, the Vienna Dioscorides." (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/aconite/materiamedica.html, accessed 11-22-2008)

Benedict of Nursia, better known as St. Benedict, founds the Abbey at Monte Cassino in Compania, Italy, introducing monastic life to Europe. His Rule, formulated near the end of his life (547), based the foundations of monastic life on prayer, study, and the assistance of the sick.

♦ "Every monastery, therefore, was obliged to have a doctor to attend patients and a separate place in the cloister where the sick could be treated. It thus became necessary for one, at least, of the monks to collect scientific material, to study it and to hand on his knowledge to those who would, in time, take his place. In this way was started that practical teaching which was transmitted by word of mouth from generation to generation to the great advantage of the sick breathren of the monastery. As many codices of Latin and Greek learning as could be found were collected, and translations and extracts made for the use of those who, either because their studies had been only elementary or because they lacked the time,  were incapable of reading their authors in the original text.

"What was the position of the monkish doctor in these religious colonies? It is true that in Benedictine monasteries the doctor was not granted a well-defined position by the monastic rule, like the Prior, the nurse (a man, of course—with a post which was merely administrative), the chaplain, the cellarer or the librarian. The title of medicus was, therefore, not official; its holder had no disciplinary power, and it could not directly procure him any privileges. It was a mere name given to monks who, as a result of their studies, showed some special capacity for the art of healing. But, without having any official status among the dignitaries of the monastery, they yet had a high moral position in the community. In official monastic documents they signed after those monks who were invested with the highest monastic rank. Their elevated moral position is quite clear from the important missions entrusted to thrm by great personages of the day, missions of trust which would not have been given to individuals who were not held in considerable esteem. . . .

"The doctor treated his patients, prescribed the medicaments and prepared them himself, using those which he kept in the armarium pigmentorum. The herb garden, which existed in every monastery, allowed him to have at hand the medicinal plants he needed. The students whom he gathered round him in the monastery helped him to treat the patients and prepared the medicines. The work was done in the Infirmary, a place varying in size with the importance of the monastery, and set apart from the dormitory and the refectory of the monks themselves. Into the Infirmary were taken not only sick monks but also gentlemen, townspeople, and even labourers who applied for admission. The monastic doctor, besides his practice, had also to undertake the copying of medical texts. . . . In each great Benedictine monastery a real studium was formed, from which doctors were sent to the minor centres. The work of the doctor, however, was not limited by the monastery walls. At that time, when civilian medicine was generally represented by bone-setters and travelling quacks, the services of the monastery doctor were asked of the Prior whenever a person of importance or a member of his family fell ill in the neighbourhood. Permission was given freely and lasted during the whole treatment. The monastic doctor was never sent away on duty unless accompanied by another monk or by one of his pupils. Owing to his vow of poverty, he himself could receive no reward for his services, but splendid donations in lands, money or kind were made by great lords who willingly gave such gifts pro recuperata valetudine" (Capparoni, "Magistri Salernitani Nondum Cogniti". A Contribution to the History of the Medical School of Salerno [1923] 3-5).

Benedict's Rule mentioned a library without mentioning  the scriptorium that would later become an integral part of monastic life.

♦ Benedictine scriptoria, where the copying of texts not only provided materials needed in the routines of the community and served as work for hands and minds otherwise idle, also produced a desirable product that could be sold. Early commentaries on the Benedictine rule suggest that manuscript transcription was a common occupation of at least some Benedictine communities. Montalembert drew attention to the 6th-century rule of St Ferreol that regarded transcription as the equivalent of manual labor since it charges that the monk "who does not turn up the earth with the plow ought to write the parchment with his fingers" (Wikipedia article on Scriptorium, accessed 02-22-2009).

"Benedictine scriptoria, and with them libraries, became active not in the time of St. Benedict himself, but under the impulse of Irish (and later English) monks on the continent in the seventh and eighth centuries. The influence of the Anglo-Saxon missionaries, principally the Wessex-born Boniface and his allies and helpers, was especially strong in Germany, leading to the foundation of episcopal centers such as Mainz and Würzburg, and of monasteries that were to become famous for their libraries such as Fulda (744) and Hersfeld (770). The Anglo-Saxons brought with them a script and books from the well-stocked English libraries. In the course of time the preparation (and even sale) as well as consumption of books became a characteristic aspect of continental monastic life and the library a central part of the monastery" (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries" in Stam (ed) The International Dictionary of Library History I [2001] 105).

•The image is a portrait of Benedict  from a fresco in the cloister of San Marco in Florence.

The Academy of Gundishapur, located in the present-day province of Khuzestan, in the southwest of Iran, which contains an important library and offers training in medicine, philosophy, theology, and science, is according to the Cambridge History of Iran, "the most important medical center of the ancient world (defined as Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East) during the 6th and 7th centuries."

The Latin herbal associated with the name of Apuleius Barbarus or Apuleius Platonicus or Pseudo-Apuleius, in distinction to Lucius Apuleius Platonicus, author of The Golden Ass, may have been put together from Greek material around 400 CE or might have been compiled earlier, possibly in Roman Africa. Nothing is known about the so-called author except his name, which may have actually been a pseudonym of Lucius Apuleius Platonicus, who described himself as "half-Numidian half-Gaetulian," and who was born in Madaurus (now M'Daourouch, Algeria), a Roman colony in Numidia on the North African coast, bordering Gaetulia.

"The history of the work has been lost with the passage of time, leading to endless speculation on the identity of the author. In all probability 'Apuleius Platonicus' was a pseudonym of Lucius Apuleius of Madaura in Numidia born AD124, [author of The Golden Ass,] while other writers refer to the him as Pseudo-Apuleius. A study of the book shows some of the plants being endemic to North Africa and lends support to the idea that the author was African" (Wikipedia article on Herbarium Apulei Platonici, accessed 06-13-2009).

The earliest surviving manuscript of this herbal, a codex containing a Latin herbarium and other medical texts, was produced in Southern Italy or Southern France in the sixth or early seventh century. It is preserved in the library of  Universiteit Leiden, Vos. Lat. Q9. 

"Its figures are much inferior those of the Vienna Dioscorides, and, like them, derivative, though of different origin; it is, therefore, in spite of being denounced by Singer as 'a futile work, with its unrecognisable figures and incomprehensible vocabulary', and by Frank J. Anderson as a 'straw desperately grasped at by despairing men', in its way a landmark in the history both of botany and of botanical illustration. It was probably written in the south of France and for many generations was unhappily to provide western illustrators from Italy to the Rhine with a storehouse for plunder " (Blunt & Raphael, The Illustrated Herbal [1979] 28).

The Herbarium Apulei was one of the most widely used remedy books of the Middle Ages. Over 60 medieval manuscripts of the text survive.

A Roman Senator, and former magister officiorum to Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic ruler of Rome, after the execution of Boethius, Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus retired and formed a school and monastery at his estate at Squillace in the far south of Italy. He named it the Vivarium, after the fishponds which were a "feature of its civilized lifestyle." The monastery included a purpose-built scriptorium, intended to collect, copy, and preserve texts. This was the last effort, at the very close of the Classical period, to bring Greek learning to Latin readers, a concern shared by Boethius who had been executed in 524.

"Cassiodorus was not so much concerned with preserving ancient literature as with educating Christian clerics. But he saw, as Augustine had seen, that a grounding in the traditional liberal arts was a necessary preliminary to the interpretation and understanding of the Bible. This program of study, set out in his treatise on divine and secular learning, Institutiones divinarum et saecularium literarum, necessarily involved a supply of books and the foundation of a library. His monks were enjoined to copy manuscripts as an act of piety, paying close attention the accuracy and presentation of their handiwork. Pagan works stood on the shelves as ancillary to Christian studies, The library of Cassiodorus, apparently arranged by subject in at least ten armaria (book cupboards), is the only sixth-century example of which there is definite knowledge.

"The monastery of Vivarium and its library seem not to have long survived the death of Cassiodrus circa 580, but amid growing political distintegration and cultural decay it set an example that was widely followed elsewhere (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries" in D. Stam (ed.) International Dictionary of Library Histories I [2001] 104-5).

At the Vivarium Cassiodorus had monks produce a vast pandect of the bible called the Codex Grandior. He also had them copy out nine volumes of his own work, Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum. "Along with detailed instruction for a religious routine, the author told how manuscripts should be handled, corrected, copied, and repaired, and included what amounted to an annotated bibliography of the best literature of the time. " (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 91).

Cassiodorus also stated "that biblical manuscripts should be bound in covers worthy of their contents, and he added that he had provided a pattern book with specimens of different kinds of bindings"  (Graham Pollard, Early Bookbinding Manuals [1984] 1). This may be the earliest detailed reference to bookbinding.

"From his [Cassiodorus's] writings we know that the library founded by him possessed 231 codices of 92 different authors, amongst which were five codices on medical subjects, including the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscorides, Celsus and Coelius Aurelianus" (Capparoni, "Magistri Salernitani Nondum Cogniti". A Contribution to the History of the Medical School of Salerno. [1923] 3).

After the death of Cassiodorus the manuscripts at the Vivarium were dispersed, though some of them found their way into the library maintained at the Lateran Palace in Rome by the Popes.

The image is from the Codex Amiatinus, noticed under the date circa 685 in this database.

The Naples Dioscorides (Codex neapolitanus Ms. Ex Vindob. Gr. 1 Salerno) preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples, is an early seventh century Greek herbal based on the De Materia Medica of the first-century Greek military physician Dioscorides (Dioscurides) containing descriptions of plants and  their medicinal uses. Until the early 18th century the manuscript was preserved in the Augustine monastery of San Giovanni a Carbonara in Naples. In 1718, the Habsburgs plundered it for the Viennese Court Library.  At the conclusion of the peace negotiations after World War I, in 1919, the codex returned to the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples.

"Unlike De Materia Medica, the text is arranged alphabetically by plant. The codex derives independently from the same model as the Vienna Dioscurides, composed ca. 512 for a Byzantine princess, but differs from it significantly: though the illustrations follow the same infered model, they are rendered more naturalistically in the Naples Dioscurides. Additionally, in the Naples manuscript, the illustrations occupy the top half of each folio, rather than being full page miniatures as in the Vienna Dioscurides. The plant descriptions are recorded below the illustration in two or three columns. The style of Greek script used in the manuscript indicates that it was probably written in Byzantine-ruled southern Italy, where ancient Greek cultural traditions remained strong, although it is not known exactly where it was produced. Marginal notes indicate that the manuscript had contact with the medical school at Salerno in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries" (Wikipedia article on Naples Dioscurides, accessed 02-03-2009).

The oldest medical document written after the Hippocratic writings, the earliest surviving major medical treatise written in Latin, and the earliest Western history of medicine, De medicina is the only extant work of Roman encyclopedist and presumed physician Aulus Cornelius Celsus, who probably lived in Gallia Narbonensis from c. 25 BCE to c. 50 CE. The earliest extant manuscripts of De medicina are :

(1) F, Codex Florent., Laurentian Library, 73, 1. IX century and in parts defective.

(2) V, Codex Romanus, Vatican Library, 5951. IX century and in parts defective.

(3) P, Codex Parisinus, Bibliothèque nationale, 7928. X century; copied from V when this was less defective.

(4) J, Codex Florent., Laurentian 73, 7, copied by Niccolò de Niccoli from a very old codex now no longer extant. XV century.

“(P) was written by ‘sacer Johannes’, probably Johannes Philagathus (abbot of Nonantola from 982, later bishop of Piacenza, and in 997-8 Antipope John XVI), who taught Gerbert’s master Otto III; and Florence, Laur. 73.1 (f, s.IX) proclaims itself ‘liber monasterii Sanct Ambrosii Mediolanensis, where Simon [Cordo] of Genoa [physician to Pope Nicholas IV] could have seen it. P, which in s.XV belonged to St. Hilary Poitiers, was copied from the other medieval manuscript, Vatican lat. 5951 (V, s. IX, northern Italy), before it lost a gathering and the last leaf. 

“F came to light in 1427, and V too was copied in s.XV; but most of the fifteenth-century manuscripts, which number more than twenty, owe the staple of their text to a lost manuscript (S) first heard of at Siena in 1426, when Panormita described its appearance as ‘prae vetustate venerabilis’. S had leaves missing when Niccoli copied from it, before the end of 1427, Florence, Laur. 73.7 (J); in 1431 he filled from F as many of the gaps as he could.” 

The first printed edition, “the editio princeps was prepared by Bartolomeo Fonzio from Florence, Laur. 73.4, which his brother Niccolò wrote and he himself corrected from F” (Reynolds, Texts and Transmission [1983] 16-17).

Celsus remains the most important source of present-day knowledge of medicine in the Roman empire. De medicina was originally part of a larger encyclopedic work covering agriculture, military science, rhetoric, government, law, philosophy and medicine, but only the eight books on medicine survived intact. The text was lost sometime during the Middle Ages and rediscovered 1426-27 as per above.

While there has been much debate as to whether Celsus was truly a “physician” (a term that in ancient times referred to someone who practiced medicine for money), it is clear from the text of De medicina that he had considerable first-hand medical expertise.

“From his writing we may conclude that his professional skills were excellent and that his knowledge of medicine was exhaustive. He was also endowed with superior literary skills. . . . His contributions to medicine are major: he wrote the first major medical treatise in Latin; he created, almost single-handedly, scientific Latin; and he wrote the first systematic review of all that was known in medicine up to his time” (Prioreschi, A History of Medicine III, 210-11).

Book I of De medicina contains a historical overview of medicine; Book II deals with the course and general treatment of diseases; Books III and IV with special therapy; Books V and VI with pharmacology (drugs and medication); Book VII with surgery; and Book VIII with bone diseases. Celsus is credited with recording the cardinal signs of inflammation: calor (warmth), dolor (pain), tumor (swelling) and rubor (redness and hyperaemia). He goes into great detail regarding the preparation of numerous ancient medicinal remedies including the preparation of opioids. In addition, he describes many first-century Roman surgical procedures which included removal of a cataract, treatment for bladder stones, and the setting of fractures.

In compiling De medicina Celsus drew heavily upon the Hippocratic corpus, referencing some 80 Greek medical writers, some of whom are now known only from Celsus’s work. He translated Greek medical terms into Latin, and many of these Latin terms have remained standard in medicine to the present day. Included among these terms is the word “cancer” (Latin for the Greek karkinos [crab]), which Celsus used to describe various types of non-malignant ulceration such as erysipelas and gangrene. In discussing malignant disease Celsus used the words carcinoma and carcinode, terms derived directly from the Greek.

When De medicina was translated into English by James Grieve in 1756 it became the first of the major medical treatises from the ancient world to appear in English.

Prioreschi, A History of Medicine III, 182-211. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) No. 424.

The earliest surviving illustrated surgical codex was made for the Byzantine physician Niketas about 900 CE. It contains 30 full-page images illustrating the commentary of Apollonios of Kition on the Hippocratic treatise On Dislocations (Peri Arthron) and 63 smaller images scattered through the pages of the treatise on bandaging of Soranos of Ephesos. The Apollonian paintings represent various manipulations and apparatus employed in reducing dislocations; each of the images is framed in in the Byzantine style in an archway of ornate design.

According to Karl Sudhoff, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Chirurgie im Mittelalter (1914) 4-7 the origins of these drawings go back to Alexandria or Cyprus where Apollonius wrote his commentary between 81 and 58 BCE, under the patronage of the king Ptolemaius (Ptolemy of Cyprus).

"They were undoubtedly transmitted directly from antiquity, and, therefore, represent the genuine Hippocratic traditions of surgical practice as transmitted through later Greek channels to Byzantium" (Garrison, Introduction to the History of Medicine 2d ed [1917] 108).

In 1495 Greek scholar Janus Laskaris purchased the Niketas Codex in Crete for Lorenzo de' Medici. It was later acquired by Cardinal Nicolas Rudolfi, and is preserved in the Laurentian Library, Florence (Codex Lxxiv, 7).

"The Leechbook of Bald is an Old English medical text probably compiled in the ninth-century, possibly under the influence of Alfred the Great's educational reforms. It takes its name from a Latin verse colophon at the end of the second book which begins Bald habet hunc librum Cild quem conscribere iussit, meaning 'Bald owns this book which he ordered Cild to compile.' The text survives in only one manuscript: London, British Library, Royal 12, D xvii.

"Both books are organised in a head-to-foot order, but the first book deals with external maladies, the second with internal disorders. Cameron notes that 'This separation of external and internal diseases may be unique in medieval medical texts'. Cameron notes that 'in Bald's Leechbook is the only plastic surgery mentioned in Anglo-Saxon records'. The recipe in particular prescribes surgery for a hare lip, Leechbook i, chapter 13 (pr Cockayne p 56). Cameron also notes that of the Old English Medical compilations 'Leechbook iii reflects most closely the medical practice of the Anglo-Saxons while they were still relatively free of Mediterranean influences,' in contrast to Bald's Leechbook which 'shows a conscious effort to transfer to Anglo-Saxon practice what one physician considered most useful in native and Mediterranean medicine,' and the Lacnunga, which is 'a sort of common place book with no other apparent aim than to record whatever items of medical interest came to the scribe's attention' " (Wikipedia article on Bald's leechbook, accessed 02-03-2009).

"Athough on the fringes of the learned world, Bede and his English monks possessed many of the same medical writings as their contemporaries further South, even if, as Bishop Cyneheard of Worcester put it in 754, the foreign ingredients prescribed therein were unknown or difficult to obtain, even through contacts in Germany or Italy. Anglo-Saxon English, like contemporary Ireland, possessed a written medical literature (from c. 900) in a non-Latin language, but this does not mean that the Anglo-Saxon healer, the laece or leech, was less competent than the medicus. Chants and charms, and explanations of a few diseases as the result of darts hurled by mischievous elves or involving a great worm constitute only a small part of the medicine that survives, and are not unique to the Anglo-Saxons. Similar recipes are found in other regions and in earlier Latin learned texts. Anglo-Saxon knowledge of plant remedies was wide and effective, and authors recognised the problems of identifying Mediterrtanean with British flora. When the otherwise unknown Bald and Cild wrote their Leechbook around 900, perhaps at Winchester, they adapted the best Continental practical medicine to an English environment. Their Leechbook has close parallels with both later Salernitan texts and with fifth-and six-century medical tracts common elsewhere in Western Europe. The simplified some of their Latin recipes by removing some of the more exotic ingredients and added remedies obtained from Ireland or Irish scholars. . . " (Conrad et al, The Western Medical Tradition 800 BC to AD 1800 [1995] 86).

MS M 652 in the Pierpont Morgan Library, written in Greek miniscule and illuminated in Constantinople during the mid-10th century, contains an alphabetical five-book version of Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, including 769 illustrations and several headpieces and tailpieces, on 385 leaves.

Its contents, according to the Morgan Library's online description, are:

"fols. 1v-199v: Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, Book I. Roots and Herbs -- fols. 200r-220v: Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, Book II. Animals, Parts of Animals and Products from Living Creatures -- fols. 221r-242v: Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, Book III. Oils and Ointments. -- fols. 243r-269v: Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, Book IV. Trees -- fols. 270v-305v: Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, Book V. Wines and Minerals etc. -- fols. 306r-319v: Dioscorides, attr., On the Power of Strong Drugs to Help or Harm -- fols. 319v-327v: Dioscorides, attr., On Poisons and their Effect -- fols. 328r-330v: Dioscorides, attr., On the Cure of Efficacious Poisons -- fols. 331r-333v: A Mithridatic Antidote -- fols. 334r-338r: Anonymous Poem on the Powers of Herbs -- fols. 338r-361r, 377r-384v: Eutecnius, Paraphrase of the Theriaca of Nicander -- fols. 361v-375r: Eutecnius, Paraphrase of the Alexipharmaca of Nicander -- fols. 375r-376v: Paraphrase of the Haliutica of Oppianos (incomplete)."

The manuscript was bound in Byzantium in the 14th or 15th century in dark brown leather blind tooled in a lozenge pattern over heavy boards. It was in Constantinople in the 15th century, where it was owned by an Arabic-speaking person, who added inscriptions in Arabic and genitalia to some animals. In the 16th century it remained in Constantinople where was owned by Manuel Eugenicos, 1578 and listed in his library catalogue. By the nineteenth century the manuscript was in Italy where it was owned by Domenico Sestini, ca. 1820. Later it was in the collection of Marchese C. Rinuccini, Florence, 1820-1849 (MS Cod. 69). From the middle of the nineteenth century it appears to have been in England with the booksellers John Thomas Payne and Henry Foss, London, 1849-1857. In the Payne sale (London, Sotheby’s, Apr. 30, 1857) it was sold to Charles Phillipps for Sir Thomas Phillipps (Phillipps Collection, no. 21975).  In 1920 J. P. Morgan Jr. purchased the manuscript from Phillipps’s estate.

Under house arrest in Cairo, Egypt, Iraqi Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham (Latinized as Alhacen or Alhazen) writes The Book of Optics (Arabic: Kitab al-Manazir‎; Latin: De Aspectibus or Opticae Thesaurus: Alhazeni Arabis,)  a seven-volume treatise on optics, physics, mathematics, anatomy and psychology.

"The book had an important influence on the development of optics, as it laid the foundations for modern physical optics after drastically transforming the way in which light and vision had been understood, and on science in general with its introduction of the experimental scientific method. Ibn al-Haytham has been called the "father of modern optics", the 'pioneer of the modern scientific method,' and the founder of experimental physics, and for these reasons he has been described as the 'first scientist.'

"The Book of Optics has been ranked alongside Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica as one of the most influential books in the history of physics, as it is widely considered to have initiated a revolution in the fields of optics and visual perception. It established experimentation as the norm of proof in optics, and gave optics a physico-mathematical conception at a much earlier date than the other mathematical disciplines of astronomy and mechanics.

"The Book of Optics also contains the earliest discussions and descriptions of the psychology of visual perception and optical illusions, as well as experimental psychology, and the first accurate descriptions of the camera obscura, a precursor to the modern camera. In medicine and ophthalmology, the book also made important advances in eye surgery, as it correctly explained the process of sight for the first time" (Wikipedia article on Book of Optics, accessed 04-23-2009).

Translated into Latin by an unknown scholar at the end of the 12th century or the beginning of the 13th, Alhazen's Book of Optics enjoyed great reputation and circulated by manuscript copying to the few who could understand it during the Middle Ages. It was first edited for print publication by Friedrich Risner and issued in Basel by Episcopus in 1572.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1027.

Peter of Eboli (Petrus Eburensis, Petrus de Ebulo), monk and court poet to Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, writes Liber ad honorem Augusti sive de rebus Siculis ("Book in honour of the Emperor, or on Sicilian affairs"; also called Carmen de motibus Siculis, "Poem on the Sicilian revolt"), an illustrated narrative in Latin elegiac couplets. The presentation copy, ordered by chancelor Konrad of Querfurt, is now MS. 120 II of the Berne Municipal Library.

The manuscript

"tells the story of Tancred of Lecce's attempt to take control of Sicily, an attempt thwarted by the successful military campaign of Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. Composed in honour of Henry VI and intended for presentation to him, the poem, distributed into three books, the last one being an encomiom [encomium] of Henry VI, and 52 continuously numbered particulae, is written in a mannered and sophisticated style. It is often mocking and extremely biased (see for example part. 4; 7-9; 25f. and the illustrations), but, once allowance has been made for this, is a useful and detailed historical source. It contains much information about Constanze of Sicily, the wife of Henry VI (part. 20ff.), and the birth of her son Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor (part. 43).

"At every page opening a column of Latin text is faced by a full page illustration with brief captions. This beautiful volume gives a rich picture of 12th century life in Italy and Sicily; it may be compared with the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry. The fierce caricatures of Tancred, who is depicted as almost ape-like in stature and features, match the propagandistic bias of the text" (Wikipedia article on Liber ad honorem Augusti, accessed 07-25-2009).

"Female nurses existed in Salerno from ancient times. Of this we have evident proof from two miniatures in a manuscript of the Carmen in honorem Augusti of Peter of Eboli in the municipal library of Berne . . . . In the first miniature we have a representation of Count Richard of Acerra lying wounded on the walls of a town he has been defending; we can see the doctor trying to extract an arrow which has pierced the jaw while two nurses carry medicaments and dressings. . . In the second an illustration of the death of William II is given; a nurse by the bed is trying to cool the heated air of the sick room by waving a fan" (Capparoni, "Magistri Salernitani Nondum Cogniti". A Contribution to the History of the Medical School of Salerno [1923] 17, frontispiece, and plate II).

Accepted as the author’s autograph, these three volumes, which are somewhat incomplete, comprise the thirty-third, forty-second, and forty-third volumes of the Comprehensive Book on the Art of Medicine by Ibn al-Nafis who died in Cairo in 1288. It is thought that Ibn-Nafis may completed this work in as many as 300 manuscript volumes that he may have published only 80 volumes in manuscript, which would have circulated in scribal copies. Of the very extensive writings that Ibn-Nafis is understood to have written, these volumes at Stanford's Lane Medical Library are the only autograph manuscripts by Ibn-al-Nafis which have been preserved, and one of a very small number of surviving autograph manuscripts by any famous medieval physician or scientist.

The first volume of these manuscripts contains a study of plants, minerals, and animals from the medical point of view. These are arranged alphabetically Vol. 2 continues the study and covers the letters tā, thā, and jīm. It consists of two sections: Vol. 3 is a study of the use of the hand and surgical instruments for medical purposes.

Al-Nafis, an Egyptian physician of the 13^th century, was credited with various innovations, most notably the discovery of the lesser circulation, three centuries before Servetus (1553) and Columbo (1559).

Provenance: Aliyah, a Jewish physician of Damascus, Darwish Abbas (seal bearing date corresponding to CE 1743/4) Ernest Seidel (1852-1922), acquired in Lane Library’s purchase of the Seidel library in 1921.

Spectacles, so essential for reading and writing, and an important factor in the spread of literacy, are thought to have been invented in thirteenth century Europe; however, their inventor is unknown. Various unsubstantiated theories were proposed over the centuries concerning possible inventors—none supported by satisfactory evidence. Some of the theories are mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Glasses.

Other contenders and snippets of evidence regarding possible inventors are listed on the London College of Optometrists web page on the Invention of Spectacles. Even though the name of the inventor or inventors of spectacles may never be confirmed, there is sufficient reason to believe that spectacles were invented toward the end of the thirteenth century, and that they became more widely used as the fourteenth century advanced.

"Venice was a major centre of glass production, and by the end of the thirteenth century eyeglasses had certainly become an object of general use there, as we can tell from an ordinance dated 2 April 1300 aimed at makers of glass and crystal. It prohibited them from perpetrating a fraud that must have become widespread: 'acquiring or causing to acquired, and selling or causing to be sold, ordinary lenses of colourless glass, under the pretense that they are crystal, for example buttons, handles, discs for kegs and for the eyes ('roidi de botacelis et da ogli'), tablets for altar pictures and crosses, and magnifying glasses ('lapides ad legendum'). The penalty was a fine and the smashing of the fraudulent object. The precise distinction made in the document between eyeglasses and magnifying glasses establishes clearly just what each of the named objects is, and since words preserve their own past like fossils preserved in amber, I note that the term Brille, which means eyeglasses in German, is derived from berillium, the medieval latin word for crystal (Frugoni, Inventions of the Middle Ages [2007] 7 and footnote 25).

The Black Death, one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, kills thirty to sixty percent of Europe's population. "The pandemic is thought to have begun in Central Asia, and spread to Europe during the 1340s. The total number of deaths worldwide is estimated at 75 million people, approximately 25–50 million of which occurred in Europe. . . . It may have reduced the world's population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million in 1400.

"The 14th century eruption of the Black Death had a drastic effect on Europe's population, irrevocably changing the social structure. It was a serious blow to the Roman Catholic Church, and resulted in widespread persecution of minorities such as Jews, foreigners, beggars, and lepers. The uncertainty of daily survival created a general mood of morbidity, influencing people to "live for the moment", as illustrated by Giovanni Boccaccio in The Decameron (1353)" (Wikipedia article on Black Death, accessed 01-03-2009).

In spite of the obvious fragility of spectacles (eyeglasses), a reasonable number of extremely early examples have survived from the mid-fourteenth century onward. Images and information about them have been collected by David A. Fleishman on his website, Antique Spectacles and other Vision Aids.

"The earliest depiction of spectacles [eyeglasses] in a painted work of art occurs in a series of frescoes dated 1352 by Tommaso da Modena in the Chapter House of the Seminario attached to the Basilica San Nicolo in Treviso, north of Venice. Cardinal Hugo of Provence is shown at his writing desk wearing a pair of rivet spectacles that appear to stay in place on the nose without additional support. The Cardinal actually died in the 1260s and could never have worn spectacles! Across the room Cardinal Nicholas of Rouen is depicted using a monocular lens in the style of later quizzing glasses. The artist has even tried to represent the physical effort of straining to see the book through the lens. The men depicted in this series of paintings are Dominicans (like Fra Rivalto), members of a dynamic monastic order founded in 1217 and regarded as 'the carrier of the sciences'. It is notable that visual aids are portrayed as devices for the use of literate men as well as aesthetes - they had, after all, commissioned this important work of early Renaissance art" (London College of Optometrists web page on the Invention of Spectacles, accessed 06-22-2009).

The Forme of Cury, a vellum scroll thought to have been written by the master-cooks of Richard II, and one of the oldest known manuscripts on cookery in the English Language, contains 196 recipes. The word 'cury' is the Middle English word for 'cookery'. The scroll was first published by the vicar and antiquary Samuel Pegge in 1780 as The Forme of Cury, a Roll of Ancient English Cookery, Compiled, about A.D. 1390, by the Master-Cooks of King Richard II, Presented Afterward to Queen Elizabeth by Edward Lord Stafford, and Now in the Possession of Gustavus Brander, Esq. Illustrated with Notes, and a Copious Index or Glossary.  The manuscript scroll is preserved in the British Library.

"The preamble to the manuscript explains that the work has been given the 'assent and avysement of Maisters and phisik and of philosophie at dwelled in his court.' ('approval and consent of the masters of medicine and of philosophy that dwelt in his (Richard II's) court.') This proud acknowledgement illustrates the ancient link between medicine and the culinary arts.

"The author states that the recipes are intended to teach a cook to make everyday dishes ('Common pottages and common meats for the household, as they should be made, craftily and wholesomely'), as well as unusually spiced and spectacular dishes for banquets ('curious potages and meetes and sotiltees for alle maner of States bothe hye and lowe.') The word 'sotiltee' (or subtlety) refers to the elaborate sculptures that often adorned the tables at grand feasts. These displays, usually made of sugar, paste, jelly or wax, depicted magnificent objects: armed ships, buildings with vanes and towers, eagles. They were also known as 'warners,' as they were served at the beginning of a banquet to 'warn' (or notify) the guests of the approaching dinner.

"The Forme of Cury is the first English text to mention olive oil, cloves, mace and gourds in relation to British food. Most of the recipes contain what were then luxurious and valuable spices: caraway, nutmeg, cardamom, ginger and pepper. There are also recipes for cooking strange and exotic animals, such as whales, cranes, curlews, herons, seals and porpoises" (http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/booksforcooks/med/pygghome/sawge.html, accessed 06-06-2009).

♦On December 2, 2009 the MailOnline reported that another manuscript of The Forme of Cury from apparently about the same time, but in codex form, was discovered in the John Rylands Library at Manchester University. The article describes the efforts at Manchester to prepare some of the recipes in that manuscript and how some of the dishes looked and tasted after they were prepared.

The Aderlasskalender for the year 1457, also known as the Laxierkalender, is issued in Mainz, printed in the type of the 36-line Bible, presumably in 1456. 

It survives in only one incomplete copy in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (ISTC No. ia00051700).

"Bleeding- and purgation-calendars, which gave details of the lucky and unlucky days on which to bleed or take medicine in a given year, were popular in the Middle Ages. They maintained their popularity with the coming of the printed book. According to Osler, 'forty-six of these bleeding-and purgation-calendars were printed before 1480; one hundred of them before 1501 have been collected. . . .' The Mainz Kalendar for 1457 is much more a purgation-than a bleeding-calendar" (Berry & Poole, Annals of Printing (1966) 13.

At the age of 80 Ottoman surgeon and physician Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu (Ottoman Turkish:شرف الدّین صابونجی اوغلی) publishes in manuscript Cerrahiyyetu'l-Haniyye (Imperial Surgery), an illustrated surgical atlas, the first medical textbook written in Turkish, probably the first atlas of pediatric surgery, and the first surgical atlas to show women surgeons. The atlas covers 191 topics in three chapters.

Three copies survived, all different, and all incomplete. One is preserved in Istanbul’s Fatih Millet Library, another at the Capa Medical History Department of Istanbul University, and a third in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. 

Before July 20 of this year Adolf Rusch, the "R" printer, of Strasbourg issues the first printed edition of De sermonum proprietate, seu de universo, written by Hrabanus Maurus (Rabanus Maurus), Archbishop of Mainz, in the first half of the ninth century. This was the first printed encyclopedia, and the first printed book to contain a chapter on medicine. That section may also be the first significant printed text on a scientific subject.

ISTC no. ir00001000:

"Dating is based on a MS. note in a copy at Paris BN (cf. CIBN). P. Needham in Christie's, Doheny 16, disputes the date, placing the types 1473-75 and regarding Mentelin in association with Rusch as responsible for the work of the R-printer."

Italian physician Paolo Bagellardo (d. 1494) has his treatise on pediatrics, De infantium aegritudinibus et remediis, printed in Padua at the press of Bartholomaeus de Valdezoccho and Martinus de Septem Arboribus. 

This was the first medical treatise, and probably also the first scientific treatise, to make its original appearance in printed form rather than having prior circulation in manuscript.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine, 1991) no. 102. ISTC no. ib00010000.

Printer Günther Zainer of Augsburg, Germany, issues Vocabularius, with text in both Latin and German. ISTC no. iv00322000.

Vocabularius rerum was the first technical dictionary, and after the Vocabularius ex quo (1467), the first bi-lingual dictionary, of which one copy is recorded (ISTC no. v00361700).  The work was "devoted entirely to technical terms, each with its own section, of medicine (four sections), culinary and medicinal herbs and food plants, zoology, mining and mineralogy, navigation, architecture, textiles, tanning and leather work, musical instruments, books and book production, cooking and kitchen utensils, baking, wine and viticulture, gambling, carpentry, horses and carriages, etc.

"Some of the words are highly technical, lexicographical rarities. In the section on scribes and book production we find definitions not only of the traditional scribal tools (calamus, stilus, graphius, pugillaris, etc.), but also of such specialist words as antipira (= the scribe's eye-shade, for protection against the fire or candle-light), corrosorium (= the mill or grinder to reduce chalk to a powder for the preparation of vellum), and epicausterium (= the table-cloth on which the parchment is laid for ease of writing). None of these last words occurs, for example, in Karen Gould's "Terms for Book Production in a Fifteenth-Century Latin-English Nominale", The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 79 (1985), pp. 75-99. There is also an entry on the distinction between the words liber, volumen, and codex; likewise between exemplar and exemplum.' (Nicholas Poole-Wilson). . . ." (W. P. Watson Antiquarian Books, online description, accessed 08-09-2009).

"Possessed of a knowledge of names rather than of things, the mediaeval student had one urgent need - a dictionary. New words began to pour in—in Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek—whose meanings he sought to know; and, for the medical student, there were new drugs, the composition and uses of which were essential to his practice. It is not surprising then to find books of the dictionary class among the first to be printed. . . . The Vocabularius . . . has four sections devoted to medicine: (1) De homine et de diversis membris, in which the parts of the body are defined in order, with the German equivalents; brief references to authors are given. (2) De nominibus balneatorum etc., containing all the terms relating to bathing, bleeding, and cupping. (3) De medicis et eorum que pertinent ad medicine artes. The definitions here are most interesting... Siringa is described as a metallic instrument with which a surgeon injects resolving medicines into the Virile member in order to dissolve calculi in the bladder. (4) De nominibus quorundam egritudinum, contains seven and a half folios of definitions of diseases." (Osler, Incunabula medica).

Printer Arnaldus de Bruxella in Naples issues the first printed edition of the hexameter poem, De viribus herbarum carmen attributed to Macer Floridus (or Aemilius Macer), possibly a pseudonym of Odo of Meung (Odo de Meung, Odo Magdunensis).

Macer's unillustrated text describes the medicinal properties of 77 herbs and is written in Latin hexameter, a poetic verse form that was most likely employed as a mnemonic device for physicians, apothecaries and others.

"The text titled De Viribus Herbarum (On properties of plants) has been traditionally attributed to Odo de Meung (Odo Magdunensis), who is believed to have lived during the first half of the 11th century and was from Meung on the Loire. Recent research has shown, however, that the De Viribus Herbarum was probably written in an earlier version, perhaps during the tenth century in Germany. The text was further expanded, including new data from the translation of Arabic texts into Latin in Salerno from the end of the 11th century onward. If this is the case, this text is good evidence of the continuity of scientific activity in the Middle Ages: its most ancient parts come from a period when there was a revival of interest in botany and a recovery of the classical tradition, while the most recent additions integrate the contribution of the Arabic world" (http://huntbot.andrew.cmu.edu/HIBD/Exhibitions/OrderFromChaos/OFC-Pages/01Pre-Linnaean%20botany/birth.shtml, accessed 06-13-2009).

ISTC no. im00001000.

The first edition of this work illustrated with woodcuts appears to be a Geneva edition printed circa 1500: ISTC No.: im00005000.

The first printed book on wine, Von Bewahrung und Bereitung der Weine, by Catalan physician Arnald of Villanova, was translated from the Latin by Wilhelm von Hirnkofen, and printed in Esslingen, Germany by Konrad Fyner. (ISTC no. ia01080000. It discusses the value of wine in diet and as a medication.

In 1943 medical historian Henry Sigerist issued a facsimile of the first edition, with an English translation and introduction, entitled The Earliest Printed Book on Wine.

♦ You can view a digital facsimile of this work at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München, website at this link: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0003/bsb00035103/images/index.html?id=00035103&fip=67.164.64.97&no=9&seite=7, accessed 01-06-2010.

The first printed herbal with illustrations was an illustrated edition of the Herbarium Apulei by Apuleius Platonicus or Pseudo-Apuleius, originally compiled circa 400 CE or earlier, and issued in Rome by the printer and diplomat Johannes Philippus de Lignamine in 1481 or 1482. The earliest surviving manuscript of this text dates from the sixth century, and is noticed in this database.

In his dedicatory letter Lignamine states that he based his edition on a manuscript found in the Abbey of Monte Cassino. In the 1930s F.W.T. Hunger identified a 9th century manuscript as Lignamine's source (codex Casinensis 97 saec.IX). This he published in facsimile as The Herbal of Pseudo-Apuleius (1935). Regrettably the manuscript was destroyed in the bombardment of Monte Casino in 1944. 

The first printed edition of Herbarium Apulei contains in addition to its text, a title within a woodcut wreath and 131 woodcuts of plants, including repeats.  It gives a multitude of prescriptions, and to make the work more useful, lists synonyms for each plant in Greek, Persian, Egyptian, and other languages, illustrating each with a stylized woodcut. These are the earliest series of printed botanical illustrations, and probably the first formal series of illustrations on a scientific subject, though they were preceded by the technological woodcuts in Valturio's De re militari, 1472.  As a practical and instructive reinforcement of the value of particular plants snakes, scorpions, and other venomous animals are depicted in the woodcuts of plants that provide relevant antedotes.

Lignamine sought patronage of his editions through the rich and powerful. As a result, two variant issues of the first edition exist with no priority established:

• one with a dedicatory letter to Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga

• another with a dedication to Giuliano della Rovere, future Pope Julius II.

Blunt & Raphael, The Illustrated Herbal (1979) 113-14. Christie's, N.Y., Important Botanical Books from a Former Private Collection, 24 June 2009, lot 15. ISTC no. ih00058000.

The earliest medical work printed in English is Treatise on the pestilence published without printer's name or date, but attributed to the press of William Machlinia, in London. "Although often attributed in incunable editions to Benedictus Kamisius, Kamintus, Canutus or Kanuti (i.e. Bengt Knutsson, bishop of Västerâs), the author is probably Johannes Jacobi (i.e. Jean Jasme or Jacme) (Wickersheimer)" (ISTC no.  ij00013200).

J. F. Payne, "The Earliest Medical Work Printed in English", British Medical Journal v.1 [1480]; May 11, 1889, 1085-86.

During three or four periods in his life Leonardo da Vinci made over 750 anatomical drawings of all the principal organs of the human body. He also produced some drawings of animal anatomy to contrast it with its human counterparts. Leonardo began recording the results of his private dissections in Milan around 1485. These primarily concerned the organs of the senses, especially the eye, a subject that would have been of special concern to an artist. In 1499 Leonardo returned to Florence where he appears to have access to bodies from the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. In a note from about 1505 Leonardo states that he had dissected at least ten bodies. During a second period of anatomical work in Milan there is evidence that Leonardo might have collaborated with a young anatomist Marcantonio della Torre Marc Antonio della Torre), who taught at the Pavia medical school. It is possible that Leonardo intended to produce an illustrated anatomical textbook with della Torre; however this project would have been cut short by Torre’s death from the plague in 1511. The drawings from Leonardo’s second anatomical period in Milan concentrated on the anatomical basis of movement—what might also be called bio-engineering—typically recording the anatomy from various different perspectives. In his final Italian period, in Rome from 1513 to 1516, Leonardo had access to the Hospital of the Santo Spirito, where he continued to study anatomy, paying particular attention to the heart. Eventually, responding to complaints from another artist, the Pope excluded Leonardo from the hospital, and ended Leonardo’s anatomical studies.

Like the rest of his drawings and notebooks on a wide variety of science and invention, Leonardo seems to have prepared these drawings for his private use--not publication. His habit of recording his notes in mirror-writing shows that contrary to having his ideas disseminated, he wanted to prevent his notes being read by others. Though the anatomical drawings and their interrelated notes record numerous discoveries, we have no documentation that Leonardo allowed any anatomist, except possibly della Torre, to view them. We do know, however, that Albrecht Dürer viewed some of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings on one of his Italian journeys, as he copied one of Leonardo’s illustrations of the upper limb in his Dresden Sketchbook, the basis for Dürer’s treatise on human proportion (1528). In addition it is probable that Leonardo’s contemporary, the anatomist Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, may have seen some of Leonardo’s drawings since Berengario appears to have incorporated into three of the woodcuts of the Isagoge Breves Leonardo’s innovation of showing views of anatomical parts from different perspectives.

After Leonardo’s death his anatomical drawings passed through many hands. They disappeared completely for a century or more until the later part of the eighteenth century when they were discovered in England in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle by the physician, connoisseur, and collector William Hunter (1718-83). Hunter wrote to Albrecht Haller about the drawings, and published a note about them in his last, posthumous book on the history of anatomy: Two Introductory Lectures, Delivered by William Hunter, To his Last Course of Anatomical Lectures . . . . (1784) . However, for the most part the drawings remained unknown to scholars.

Until the advent of sophisticated photographic facsimile techniques at the turn of the twentieth century Leonardo’s anatomical notebooks, with their mutually dependent text and illustrations, could not be accurately reproduced. Thus appreciation of Leonardo’s contributions to anatomy and physiology is primarily a 20th-century phenomenon. The immense task of editing Leonardo’s anatomical notebooks was originally undertaken by G. Piumati, who prepared both literal and critical transcriptions of Leonardo’s text, and Mathias-Duval, professor of anatomy at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts and the Parisian Faculty of Medicine, who provided a French translation as well as a scholarly introduction. Sabachnikoff, who sponsored this project, planned to publish all of the Windsor Castle anatomical drawings in this fashion, but was not able to complete his plan, issuing only reproductions of 61 sheets in Fogli A and Fogli B in 1898 and 1901. A decade later the remaining anatomical drawings (approximately 700) were edited and published by Norwegian scholars under the auspices of the Anatomical Institute of the University of Christiania [Oslo] in an edition limited to 250 sets as Quaderni d'anatomia, I-VI; Fogli della Royal Library di Windsor, pubblicati da C.L. Vangensten, A.Fonahn, H.Hopstock. 6 volumes, Christiana, J.Dybwad, 1911-1916. The plates were reproduced in color, with numbered keys on transparent overlays, and Leonardo’s Italian text was transcribed along with translations in both English and German.  Later Kenneth D. Keele and Carlo Pedretti re-edited and republished the entire  collection of Leonardo's anatomical drawings as Corpus of the Anatomical Studies in the Collection of her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle. This was issued in a magnificent edition by Johnson Reprint Corporation of New York in 1980.

Keele,  Leonardo da Vinci’s Elements of the Science of Man (1983). Roberts & Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body (1992) ch. 4.

The first separately printed treatise on diet, De particularibus diaetis, was written by the Egyptian-Jewish physician and philosopher Isaac Judaeus who lived from circa 832 to 932 CE. He was also known as Isaac Israeli and Abu Ya'qub Ishaq Sulayman al-Israili. The Latin edition was a translation made from the Arabic, circa 1070, by Constantine the African, and first printed in Padua by Matthaeus Cerdonis.

De particularibus diaetis  was a portion of " 'Kitab al-Adwiyah al-Mufradah wa'l-Aghdhiyah,' a work in four sections on remedies and aliments. The first section, consisting of twenty chapters, was translated into Latin by Constantine under the title 'Diætæ Universales,' and into Hebrew by an anonymous translator under the title 'Ṭib'e ha-Mezonot.' The other three parts of the work are entitled in the Latin translation 'Diætæ Particulares'; and it seems that a Hebrew translation, entitled 'Sefer ha-Mis'adim' or 'Sefer ha-Ma'akalim,' was made from the Latin" (Wikipedia article on Isaac Israeli ben Solomon, accessed 06-08-2009).

A more complete printed edition of the text appeared in Basel in 1570.

J. Norman (ed.) Morton's Medical Bibliography, 5th ed. (1991) no. 1961. Campbell, Arabic Medicine and its Influence on the Middle Ages I (1926) 73.

ISTC no. ii00176000.

German Inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger publish Malleus maleficarum  (English: The Hammer of Witches). This was "without question the most important and most sinister work on demonology ever written.  It crystallized into a fiercely stringent code previous folklore about black magic with church dogma on heresy, and, if any one work could, opened the floodgates of the inquisitorial hysteria" (Robbins, Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology [1959] 337).

Malleus maleficarum became a best-seller, with six editions in the 15th century, thirty-six editions published during the witchcraft hysteria up to 1669, and it is thought that its widespread distribution, made possible by printing, contributed to the spread of the witchcraft delusion.

The work owed its authority to three factors:

1. The scholastic reputation of its two authors, the German Inquisitors Sprenger and Kramer.

2. The papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus of December 5, 1484, which Kramer solicited from Pope Innocent VIII in order to silence the opposition to witch persecution. ISTC no. ii00101500.

3. The detailed procedures for witchcraft trials set forth in the book's third and final part, written for the benefit of civil and ecclesiastical judges. As the leading handbook for witch-hunters, and the first encyclopedia of witchcraft, the Hammer of Witches maintained a pre-eminent position of authority for nearly 200 years, providing both foundation and inspiration for all later European treatises on witch-theory and persecution.

ISTC no. ii00163000.

Venetian printers Giovanni and Gregorio Gregoriis, de Forlivio,  issue the first printed edition of Fasciculus medicinae under the authorship of Johannes de Ketham. This collection of short medical treatises, some dating as far back as the thirteenth century, circulated widely in manuscript prior to printing. The printers may have attributed the collection to the former owner of the manuscript they printed: Johannes von Kirchheim, a professor of medicine in Vienna circa 1460. "Ketham" is a plausible Italian corruption of "Kirchheim."

The first edition was the first printed medical book to have anatomical illustrations of any kind. It was followed by an Italian translation issued by the same printers in Venice 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. The dramatically improved and more realistic illustrations, which were reproduced in the numerous later editions, are by an unknown artist, probably from the school of Giovanni Bellini.

In the woodcuts prepared for the Italian edition 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, History of Anatomical Illustration, 66). 

Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomical Illustration (1920) 115-122.  Herrlinger  28-29; 65-66. J. Norman (ed) Morton's Medical Bibliography 5th ed (1991) no. 363.  Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1211 (1495 edition). ISTC no. ik00013000.

♦ You can view a digital facsimile from the website of Harvard University Libraries at this link: http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/7622337?n=8&imagesize=1200&jp2Res=.125, accessed 01-02-2009.

French physician and writer Symphorien Champier publishes in Lyon De medicine claris scriptoribus in quinque partibus tractatus, as part of his Libelli duo. 

Champier's biographical study of famous medical writers included a brief listing of their writings which is considered the first published medical bibliography, after Galen's bibliography of his own writings, De libris propriis liber, which was written in the second century CE, but not printed until 1525.  Champier's work has also been called the first history of medicine after De medicina by the Roman writer Celsus.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 10.

Giacomo Berengario da Carpi publishes Commentaria cu[m] amplissimis additionibus super anatomia Mu[n]dini. . .  in Bologna. This thick quarto of over 1000 pages includes 21 full-page woodcut text illustrations plus an architectural title-border, which includes an image of a dissection scene.

Berengario was the first anatomist to publish illustrated treatises on anatomy based on his own dissections. His Commentaria on the fourteenth-century Anatomia of Mondino was the first work since the time of Galen to display any considerable amount of original anatomical information based upon personal investigation and observation. The woodcut illustrations of muscle men posed before a landscape background in this work, while crude and lacking in detail in comparison to those in Vesalius's Fabrica (1543), represent the model on which Vesalius based his series of larger and more scientifically portrayed muscle men, and the title page of Berengario's work, with its small illustration of a dissection scene in the lower margin, may have suggested to Vesalius the idea for the dramatic and famous frontispiece to the Fabrica. Vesalius also borrowed from Berengario the concept of having particular anatomical figures perform specific actions, and repeated Berengario's trick of showing a skeleton holding a skull in each hand as a means of illustrating three separate views of the skull in one woodcut.

An art collector and patron who, according to Vasari, once accepted a Raphael painting of St. John in the Desert as a fee for medical attendance, it is probable that Berengario saw some of Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings, as Leonardo’s artistic techniques of depicting anatomical parts from different perspectives were incorporated in some of his woodcuts. It is also likely that Berengario would have hired a fine artist to prepare the woodcuts for his books. Some of the woodcuts have been attributed to the Italian Mannerist painter and sculptor Amico Aspertini.

The Commentaria's scientific contributions include the first reference to the vermiform appendix and the first good account of the thymus. Its descriptions of the male and female reproductive organs, the process of reproduction and the fetus were more extensive than any earlier account, and Berengario was the first to call attention to the greater proportional capacity of the female pelvis to the male pelvis.

For the attribution to Aspertini see Cazort, Kornell, Roberts, The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy (1996) 38-39. Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration [1920] 137-139. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 187.

One year after publishing his Commentary on Mondino, Giacomo Berengario da Carpi issues Isagoge breves perlucide ac uberime in anatomia humani corporis. . . . from Bologna.

Consisting of about 150 pages, but with most of the same woodcuts, the Isagoge is a condensation of the much larger and more expensive Commentaria, intended as a manual for his students, and as a replacement for his obsolete 1514 edition of Mondino's Anathomia. It has the same arrangement of contents as the Commentaria, and includes some additional anatomical observations, such as the report of a fused kidney with horseshoe configuration seen at a public dissection in 1521, and a description of the valves of the heart.

One year later Berengario issued a revised and expanded second edition of his Isagoge, containing three more anatomical woodcuts, as well as some revisions to the illustrations that had appeared in the first edition; these alterations and additions emphasized the anatomy of the heart and brain, and included the first published view of the cerebral ventricles from an actual dissection. The architectural title-border was first used in Berengario's Commentaria (1521); here, it has been altered to read "Maria" instead of "Leo P.X.," and Berengario's surname "Carpus" appears both in the architrave and the vignette. The shield has also been altered to read "YHS."

Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration (1920) 136-142. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) nos. 188, 189.

The first collected edition of the Hippocratic collection is published in Latin translation in Rome dedicated to Pope Clement VII: Hippocratis Coi medicorum omnium longe principis, octoginta volumnia quibus maxima ex parte, annorum circiter duo millia Latina caruit lingua. . . . translated by Marco Fabio Calvo of Ravenna.

"This volume, which preceded the first, Aldine, edition of the Greek text by a year, 'changed what was known of Hippocrates almost beyond recognition.' In the sixteenth century the influence of Galen remained greater than that of Hippocrates, and many aspects of Renaissance Hippocratism remained to be investigated. Nonetheless, it is clear that the name of Hippocrates was invoked by physicians seeking an alternative to aspects of academic Galenism—so that an appeal to an authority even more venerable than Galen on occasion served to justify criticism of current beliefs and practices, if not innovation. Moreover medieval Hippocratic spuria began to be weeded out and the Epidemics are likely to have had some influence upon descriptions of patients and diseases.

"Fabio Calvo's original plan was apparently to publish a printed edition both of the Greek text and of his own Latin translation of the Hippocratic corpus, although as it turned out, only the translation was printed. A scholar of ascetic and frugal character—of which his vegetarianism was considered especially impressive evidence—he embarked on his work on Hippocrates when he was already an old man. As a friend of Raphael, for whom he translated Vitruvius into Italian, and an enthusiast for Roman antiquities, he also undertook the production of an illustrated volume on the urban geography of ancient Rome. Fabio Calvo finished collating and writing out his own copy of the Greek text of the Hippocratic corpus in 1512. His main source was fourteenth-century manuscript—then believed to be of considerably greater antiquity—in his own possession. But he also consulted one of the oldest and most important Hippocratic manuscripts, a twelfth-century codex that has been among the papal books since Charles of Anjou gave it to Clement IV in 1266" (Nancy G. Siraisi, "Life Sciences and Medicine in the Renaissance World," Grafton (ed) Rome Reborn. The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture [1993] 181-83).

♦ Calvo's autograph transcription of his 14th century Greek manuscript, the 14th century manuscript itself, the autograph manuscript of his Latin translation, as well as the twelfth century codex presented to Clement IV, are preserved in the Vatican library. The 14th century manuscript and both of Calvo's autograph manuscripts are illustrated in Rome Reborn, of which there is also an abbreviated online version.

What is called the "Hippocratic collection" is a conglomeration of works traditionally attributed to the medical school of the Greek Island of Cos, but now thought to include writings that may have come also from Cnidus, and perhaps also from Italy. The majority of these works date from the last decades of the fifth and the first half of the fourth centuries BCE.  Among the Hippocratic collection are five writings that may be characterized as anatomical:  (one page), On the Heart, On the Nature of Bones, On Flesh, and On Glands. These are among the earliest anatomical writings preserved from ancient Greece. However, no Greek physician before Herophilus of Alexandria practiced human dissection in a systematic way. The remainder of the Hippocratic collection falls under the folowing general categories: Theoretical Writings, Clinical Medicine, Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Deontology (including the Hippocratic Oath). Although none of the seventy-odd works in this collection can be attributed with certainty to Hippocrates, the writings retain their historical significance as the earliest extant sources of Western medical thought and practice. The school, or schools, identified with Hippocrates established an empirical system of medicine based upon observation and clinical experience, advancing medicine beyond the influences of magic and priestcraft.

Prioreschi, A History of Medicine, II: Greek Medicine (1996) 222-229. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1076.

A few months after his death, Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion by German artist Albrecht Dürer was published in Nuremberg. This work, written, illustrated and designed by Dürer, with woodcuts on virtually every page, was the first book to discuss the problems of comparative and differential anthropometry. In his study of the subject Dürer was influenced by the classic aesthetic treatises of Villard de Honnecourt, Vitruvius, Alberti and da Vinci; however, Dürer’s study of the different human physiques—fat, thin, tall, short, baby, child and adult —was entirely original.

Unlike his Italian contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci, who published nothing, Dürer lived and worked in the world of printing and engraving. The son of a goldsmith, Durer’s godfather was Anton Koberger, who left goldsmithing to become the leading printer and publisher in Nuremberg. At the age of 15 Dürer was apprenticed to the leading artist in Nuremberg, Michael Wolgemut, whose workshop produced a large quantity of woodcuts. Throughout his career Dürer embraced the latest and best reproduction techniques, and may have derived more income from the sale of engravings and woodcuts than from painting.

Toward the end of his life Dürer wrote and illustrated three treatises which he also designed for the press. These included a treatise on fortification, a treatise on mensuration which introduced to Northern Europe techniques of perspective and mathematical proportion in drawing, painting, architecture and letter forms, which Dürer learned in Italy, and a work on the proportion of the human body. The last work, issued shortly after Dürer’s death, was the first work to discuss the problems of comparative and differential anthropometry. Because Dürer copied one of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings of the upper limb into his Dresden Sketchbook we know that on one of his visits to Italy Dürer must have viewed at least some of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings. However, unlike Leonardo who explored both the surface and the interior of the human body, Dürer appears to have limited his interest in the human figure to the surface.

Dürer held that the essence of true form was the primary mathematical figure (e.g., straight line, circle, curve, conic section) constructed arithmetically or geometrically, and made beautiful by the application of a canon of proportion. However, he was also convinced that beauty of form was a relative and not an absolute quality; thus the purpose of his system of anthropometry was to provide the artist with the means to delineate, on the basis of sheer measurement, all possible types of human figures. The first two books of Dürer's work deal with the proper proportions of fat, medium and thin adult figures, as well as those of infants. The third book discusses the changing of proportions according to mathematical rules, applying these rules to both figures and faces. The fourth book treats of the movement of bodies in space, and is of the greatest mathematical interest, as it presents, for the first time, many new, intricate and difficult considerations of descriptive spatial geometry. The whole work is profusely illustrated with Dürer's woodcut diagrams of figures. Choulant states that these include "the first attempts to represent shades and shadows in wood engraving by means of cross-hatching" (p. 145).

Like the Underweysung der Messung (1525), Dürer dedicated his book on human proportion to his friend, the humanist Willibald Pirckheimer. Pirckheimer provided a preface describing Dürer's debt to the Italians, alluding to Dürer’s visits to Giovanni Bellini and Andrea Mantegna, and explaining Dürer’s influence on Italian and European art.

Remarkably about 1500 pages of manuscripts by Dürer survive in Dresden, London, Nuremberg and Berlin. These include the manuscript for Book One of the Four Books on Human Proportion. Its pages number 1-89 and on the first page is written:

"1523 at Nuremberg, this is Albrecht Dürer's first book, written by himself. This book I improved and handed to the printer in 1528. Albrecht Dürer."

The so-called Dresden Sketchbook, with 170 pages of drawings, also includes a large  number of preparatory drawings for the treatise on human proportion. Dürer's Sketchbook was published as The Human Figure by Albrecht Dürer. The Complete Dresden Sketchbook. Edited, with an Introduction, Translations and Commentary by Walter L. Strauss (1972). Panofsky, Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1943), chapter on "Durer as a Theorist of Art."

German botanist and theologian Otto Brunfels publishes the first two volumes of Herbarum vivae eicones ad nature imitationem, sum[m]a cum diligentia et artificio effigiate. . . .  in Strassburg. The third volume was edited by Michael Heer and published two years after Brunfels's death.

While earlier herbals were llustrated with conventional stylized figures, copied and recopied over the centuries from one manuscript to another, Brunfels's Herbarum was illustrated with detailed, accurate renderings of plants taken directly from nature, most of them showing all portions of the plant (root, stem, leaves, flowers and fruit), and some even going so far as to depict wilted leaves and insect damage. The artist responsible for the illustrations was Hans Weiditz; his contributions were credited in a poem appearing on leaf A4r, making him the first botanical illustrator to be recognized for his work. Comparison of Weiditz's woodcuts with the woodcuts in Leonhard Fuchs's De historia stirpium (1542) show that the artists who worked with Fuchs were strongly influenced by Weiditz's work.

In contrast to its revolutionary images, the text of the Herbarum was an uncritical compendium of quotations from older authorities, primarily concerned with the therapeutic virtues of each plant. Brunfels made no attempt to classify the plants he discussed, but related species often appear in close proximity to one another. He restricted himself to plants indigenous to Strassburg and described over forty new species. At the end of the second volume is a collection of twelve tracts edited by Brunfels, entitled De vera herbarum cognitione appendix. This includes the first published writings of both Jerome Bock and Leonhard Fuchs. 

Morton, History of Botanical Science (1981) 124.  Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 361.

German physician, anatomist, mathematician and astronomer Johann Dryander publishes Anatomia capitis humani. . . . in Marburg. 

Dryander's work was the first significant book on the anatomy of the head, and one of the earliest anatomical works with illustrations after the author's own dissections. The thin quarto of 14 leaves includes 11 full-page woodcut text illustrations, 5 of which are signed with a monogram consisting of an open pair of compasses (the emblem of the Apostle Thomas) above the letter "G", frequently with the initials "GVB" or "VB" inscribed above. This monogram has been linked to the Basel woodcutter Georg Thomas, and also to the German painter and woodcut engraver Hans Brosamer. 

Dryander, who studied anatomy at Paris at the same time as Vesalius, produced in his Anatomia capitis one of the most important pre-Vesalian anatomical studies, showing by means of full-page woodcuts how he learned to dissect and display human anatomy. He was one of the first physicians in Germany to perform public dissections, and the text of Anatomia capitis is the printed record of an anatomical demonstration he gave at Marburg. Anatomia capitis was probably published in a small edition, as Dryander intended it to serve as the preliminary to a full-scale anatomy.

This scheme Dryander partially realized the following year when he issued his Anatomia, hoc est corporis humani dissectionis pars prior. That expanded work included 36 leaves and 19 full-age woodcuts, plus a woodcut title border. Eight of the woodcuts (one of which is repeated) are repetitions of illustrations 1-8 in the 1536 Anatomia, with the illustration numbers removed from the blocks. Another 8 woodcuts (one, "Universalis figura capitis humani," repeated) are new to this work; 3 of them are signed with the monogrammed compass device used in the 1536 edition. In addition, there are 3 illustrations made up of images rearranged from illustrations 9, 10 and 11 of the 1536 Anatomia. 

Dryander's Anatomiae contained a more extensive anatomy of the human head than his Anatomia capitis and included material on the lungs and heart; it also reprinted the manual for pig dissection, Anatomia porci, traditionally ascribed to Copho (fl. 1110), and excerpts from the Anatomia infantis of Gabriele de Zerbis.

Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration (1920) 148-149. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) nos. 656-57.

German physician and botanist Leonhard Fuchs publishes De historia stirpium (On the History of Plants) in Basel at the office of printer Michael Isengrin. It was illustrated with full-page woodcut illustrations drawn by Albrecht Meyer, copied onto the blocks by Heinrich Füllmaurer and cut by Veit Rudolf Speckle; the artists' self-portraits appear on the final leaf. Some copies were issued with the woodcuts hand-colored under the publisher's, or the artists' supervision.

Describing and illustrating circa 400 native German and 100 foreign plants-- wild and domestic—in alphabetical order, with a discussion of their medical uses, De historia stirpium was probably inspired by the pioneering effort of Otto Brunfels, whose Herbarum vivae imagines had appeared twelve years earlier. "These two works have rightly been ascribed importance in the history of botany, and for two reasons. In the first place they established the requisites of botanical illustration—verisimilitude in form and habit, and accuracy of significant detail. . . . Secondly they provided a corpus of plant species which were identifiable with a considerable degree of certainty by any reasonably careful observer, no matter by what classical or vernacular names they were called. . ." (Morton, History of Botanical Science [1981] 124).

Fuch's herbal is also remarkable for containing the first glossary of botanical terms, for providing the first depictions of a number of American plants, including pumpkins and maize, and for its generous tribute to the artists Meyer, Füllmaurer and Speckle, whose self-portraits appear on the last leaf.  This tribute to the artists may be unique among sixteenth century scientific works, many of which were illustrated by unidentified artists, or artists identified by name only. It is especially unusual for the name of the artist who transferred the drawings onto the woodblocks to be recorded, let alone for that artist to be portrayed.

The widely known and distinctive plant species Fuchsia, named after Fuchs, was discovered on Santo Domingo in the Caribbean in 1696/97 by the French scientist Dom Charles Plumier, who published the first description of "Fuchsia triphylla, flore coccineo" in 1703. The color fuchsia is also named for Fuchs, describing the purplish-red of the shrub's flowers.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 846.

English physician, traveller, and writer, Andrew Boorde, publishes Hereafter foloweth a compendyous regyment or a dyetary of helth: made in Mou[n]tpyllier, compyled by Andrew Boorde of physiycke doctour, dedycated to the armypotent prynce, and valyaunt Lorde Thomas Duke of Northfolche. This was the first printed book to set out rules for a healthy diet, for those who could afford it.

Formerly a Carthusian monk, but by this time known as "Merry Andrew" to his friends, Boorde was "making an enviable living as a physician and purveyer of health foods in Fleet Street, London; although he had more than once been accused on scandalous behavior and loose living. He is alleged to have attributed his extreme virility and undoubted success with the ladies to a balanced diet in which oysters and figs played a prominent part. . . .

"His Dyetary of helth passed through at least four editions before the end of the sixteenth century, much of its popularity stemming from the many ingenious dietary methods he revealed by which male virility could be improved and erections prolonged. The common artichoke was his favorite recommended aphrodisiac, and must have led to a considerable run on this scarce vegetable for several seasons. Mixed with rocket seed, the effect was alleged to be dramatic. 'Eat them at dyner,' he advised his readers, 'they doth increase nature, and provoke a man to veneryous actes.'

"Unfortunately, there were an unlucky few on which this sovereign remedy for keeping one's end up did not immediately work, and Boorde devoted a whole chapter to those he designated with a compassionate eye as melancholy men,' For them the diet was strict:

'Melancholy is colde and drye; wherefore melancholy men must refrayne from fryde meate, and meate whych is ower salte. And from meate this sowre and harde of dygestyon, and from all meate whych is burnt and drye. They must abstayn from immoderate thurste, and from drynking of hot wines and grosse wine, as red wyne. And use these thyngs; cowe mylke, almond mylke, yokes of rere eggs. Boyled meate is better for melancholy men that rosted meates whych do engender good blode, and meates that whyche be temperately hote, be goode for melancholy men. And so be all herbes whyche be hotte and moyste. These thyngs followyng do purge melancoly; quycke-beam, senna sticados, harts-tongue, mayden-hair borage, oraganum [majoram] suger and whyte wyne.'

"Once having thoroughly purged melancholy, a generous helping of rocket seed and artichoke would have its usual dramatic and uplifting effect, with the one-time enforced celebate made 'merrry wyth much venery.' This was Dr. Boorde's specific for nearly all masculine ills, and one he seems to have constantly restorted to himself, to an extent that caused so much scandal in his home town of Winchester that the 'three loose women' he kept in his rooms there were 'openly punished in the greate churche and stretes of that city.'

"His Breviary of Healthe appeared in 1547; but within a month or two of its appearance Boorde was arrested and thrown unceremoniously into the Fleet Prison on charge of permitted 'boggery' in Winchester, together with an assorted array of sexual malpractices that would make headline news in the Sunday newspapers even today. Merry Andrew indignantly denied the charges, but there was no escape. He resigned himself to death and made his will on April 1, 1549. He died in Fleet soon after, probably of the 'syckness of the Prysons,' so at least he cheated the executioner. As Merry Andrew, his effigy was erected as an Aunt Sally or cock-shy by fairground stallholders for several centuries after his death, the name giving a new phrase to the English language" (Quayle, Old Cookery Books. An Illustrated History [1978] 29-31).

At the age of only 29, physician, surgeon, and anatomist Andreas Vesalius publishes De humani corporis fabrica libri septem in Basel,  revolutionizing the science and teaching of human anatomy.

Throughout this encyclopedic 400,000 word book on the structure and workings of the human body Vesalius provided a fuller and more detailed description of human anatomy than any of his predecessors, correcting errors in the traditional anatomical teachings of Galen, which had been obtained from primate rather than human dissection, and arguing that knowledge of human anatomy was to be obtained only from human sources.  Even more revolutionary than his criticism of Galen and other medieval authorities was Vesalius's assertion that the dissection of cadavers must be performed by the physician himself-- a direct contradiction of the medieval doctrine that dissection was a task to be performed by menials while the physician lectured from the traditional authorities.  Only through actual dissection, Vesalius argued, could the physician learn human anatomy in sufficient detail to teach it accurately.  This "hands-on" principle remained Vesalius's most lasting contribution to the teaching of anatomy; it is graphically represented in the Fabrica's woodcut title page (the earliest illustration of an anatomical theatre), which shows Vesalius with his right hand plunged into an opened cadaver, conducting an anatomical demonstration. Because it was then legal only to dissect the cadavers of executed criminals, and these cadavers were always in short supply, Vesalius urged physicians to take their own initiative in obtaining material for dissection.  The Fabrica contains several amusing and unrepentant anecdotes of how students had robbed graves to obtain cadavers, especially those of women, since female criminals were rarely executed in those days.

The Fabrica also broke new ground in its unprecendented blending of scientific exposition, art and typography. Although earlier anatomical books, such as those by Berengario da Carpi had contained some notable anatomical illustrations, they had never appeared in such number or been executed in such minute precision as in the Fabrica, and they had usually been introduced rather haphazardly with little or no relationship to the text.  In contrast, Vesalius sent his woodblocks to the printer with precise instructions as to placement within the text, and with exact marginal references which brought about direct relationship of text to illustrations, or even details within illustrations.  The series of historiated initials, in which putti and dwarfed men humorously perform some of the more grisly actions associated with dissection, have been called pictorial footnotes to the text.  The book remains the typographic masterpiece of Johannes Oporinus of Basel, one of the most widely learned and iconoclastic of the scholar printers, whose success with this book apparently caused Vesalius to entrust to Oporinus all of his later publications.

The Fabrica's magnificent title page and the spectacular series of hundreds of anatomical woodcuts (full-page and smaller) spread throughout the book remain the most famous series of anatomical illustrations ever published.  Although the illustrations were attributed traditionally to an associate of Titian, Jan Stephan von Calcar who drew and, possibly engraved, the three woodcuts of skeletons in Vesalius's first series of anatomical charts, Tabulae anatomicae sex (1538), there is no reliable basis for this attribution.  The Fabrica woodcuts were produced by an unknown artist or artists in Titian's workshop.  Vesalius commissioned the illustrations and supervised their production.  It is also quite possible that he personally drew some of the lesser illustrations for the Fabrica, as we know that he made the drawings for the first three of the Tabulae anatomicae sex.  The woodblocks for the Fabrica were preserved in Munich until their destruction in World War II.

A notable feature of the Fabrica not usually considered is Vesalius' "Index of Notable Subjects and Words" published at the end of the work. Arranged alphabetically by subject, and either by first name or surname somewhat inconsistently, this index to page number and line number on a given page amounts to a detailed outline of what Vesalius considered his significant original contributions.  For example, under Galen he indexed to each specific anatomical detail where he disagreed with Galen's writings.

♦ You can page through a digital facsimile of the 1543 Fabrica at the National Library of Medicine website at this link.

Shortly after publishing his encyclopedic De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, Andreas Vesalius issued De humani corporis fabrica epitome. This thin set of 14 unnumbered leaves, each containing images and text, and published in large folio format even larger than the Fabrica, was an outline, or precis, or road-map of essential information contained in the Fabrica, including some different and spectacular larger images. This was the first time that the author of a revolutionary medical or scientific work issued a condensation of his essential information roughly simultaneously with the main publication.

Vesalius suggested that the large sheets of the Epitome may be mounted on the walls of dissection rooms as a guide to dissection. As a result, relatively few sets of the sheets were bound up as books, and only a small portion of the original printing survives.

While the Fabrica was a very expensive encyclopedic work Vesalius' Epitome was a much less expensive work that presented essential anatomical information in a concise, comparatively easy to understand manner. It became far more widely published and distributed than the Fabrica. By August 9,1543  Vesalius published a German translation of the Epitome in Basel, and many plagiarisms and adaptations of the Epitome were published in various European countries throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Because of its much wider publication and distribution, even more than the Fabrica, Vesalius' Epitome was the publication that revolutionized the teaching and study of human anatomy.

French physician, writer, and translator, Charles Estienne, of the Estienne printing dynasty, publishes De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres. . . . in Paris.

Charles, the younger son of Henri I Estienne, was a member of the second generation of the Estienne dynasty of scholar-printers. His De dissectione, one of the most interesting woodcut books of the French Renaissance, was printed at the Estienne Press by his stepfather Simon de Colines, who ran the press from Henri I's death until Charles's brother Robert came of age.

Estienne studied medicine in Paris, completing his training in 1540; in 1535, during his course of anatomical studies under Jacques Dubois  (Jacobus Sylvius), he had Andreas Vesalius as a classmate. At the time the only illustrated manuals of dissection available were the writings of Berengario da Carpi, and the need for an improved, well-illustrated manual must have been obvious to all students of anatomy, particularly the medical student son of one of the world's leading publishers. Estienne did not hesitate to fill this need. The manuscript and illustrations for De dissectione were completed by 1539, and the book was set in type halfway through Book 3 and the last section, when publication was stopped by a lawsuit brought by Étienne de la Rivière, an obscure surgeon and anatomist who had attended lectures at the Paris faculty during 1533-1536, overlapping the time of Estienne's medical study in Paris.

According to historian of surgery and economist, François Quesnay, Estienne may have attempted to plagiarize a manuscript of Étienne de la Rivière which the latter had turned over to him for translation from French into Latin. In the eventual settlement of the lawsuit, Estienne was required to credit Rivière for the various anatomical preparations and for the pictures of the dissections. Had De dissectione been published in 1539, there is no question that it would have stolen much of the thunder from Vesalius's Fabrica: it would have been the first work to show detailed illustrations of dissection in serial progression, the first to discuss and illustrate the total human body, the first to publish instructions on how to mount a skeleton, and the first to set the anatomical figures in a fully developed panoramic landscape, a tradition begun by Berengario da Carpi in his Commentary on Mondino. Nonetheless, Estienne's work still contained numerous original contributions to anatomy, including the first published illustrations of the whole external venous and nervous systems, and descriptions of the morphology and purpose of the "feeding holes" of bones, the tripartate composition of the sternum, the valvulae in the hepatic veins and the scrotal septum. In addition, the work's eight dissections of the brain provide more anatomical detail that had previously appeared.

The anatomical woodcuts in De dissectione have attracted much critical attention due to their wide variation in imagistic quality, the oddly disturbing postures of the figures in Books 2 and 3, the obvious insertion in many blocks (again, in Books 2 and 3) of separately cut pieces for the dissected portions of the anatomy, and the uncertainty surrounding the sources of the images. The presence of inserts in main blocks would suggest that these blocks were originally intended for another purpose, and in fact a link has been established between the gynecological figures in Book 3, with their frankly erotic poses, and the series of prints entitled The Loves of the Gods, engraved by Gian Giacomo Caraglio after drawings by Perino del Vaga and Rosso Fiorentino. It has also been conjectured that the male figures in Book 2 are from blocks cut for an unpublished book of anatomical designs after Rosso Fiorentino's studies of bodies disinterred from the burial grounds at Borgo; however, this speculation remains insufficiently supported by evidence.

Possible explanations of this connection between pornography and anatomy are that the engraver of the female nude woodcuts did not have access to a model, and for the sake of expediency copied the general outlines of the female nudes from "The Loves of the Gods," eliminating the male figures from the erotic illustrations. Another wood engraver, perhaps Rivière, would then have prepared the anatomical insert blocks showing the internal organs. Economic reasons may also have been a factor, as commissioning entirely new woodcuts would certainly have cost more in time and money than adapting existing artwork, and after the enforced delay imposed by Étienne de la Rivière's lawsuit, both time and money may well have been in short supply. A third explanation might have been that the publishers intended to commercialize the anatomy by stressing the erotic overtones, thus appealing to a wider market than strictly physicians. Possibly because of the erotic connection, the work sold unusually well for a anatomical treatise, appearing in French the following year, with publication of an edition of the plates alone, without text, several years later. During a period in which printed erotica was very difficult to come by there would have been considerable demand for erotic images made acceptable by their adaption for medical purposes.

Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration (1920) 152-155. Kellett, "Perino del Vaga et les illustrations pour l'anatomie d'Estienne," Aesculape 37 (1955), 74-89. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 728.

From the press operated by Pierre Gautier in the Paris castle of Benevenuto Cellini, Italian physician Guido Guidi (Vidius Vidius) issues Chirurgia è graeco in latinum conversa . . . .  The elegantly printed and illustrated small folio includes 210 text woodcuts, most probably after drawings by the school of Francesco Salviati (Francesco de'Rossi).

Guidi's Chirurgia was derived from the Nicetas Codex, a tenth-century illustrated Byzantine manuscript of surgical works on the treatment of fractures and luxations by Hippocrates, Galen and Oribasius, discussed circa 900 in this database. In 1542, Guidi presented an illustrated copy of this manuscript, along with the manuscript of his own illustrated Latin translation, to François I of France, whom he served as royal physician from 1542 until the king's death in 1547. These manuscripts are preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Guidi had his Latin translation printed by Pierre Gaultier, a printer residing at the castle of Benvenuto Cellini, where Guidi also lived during the time he spent in Paris. The Chirurgia was the only one of Guidi's works published during his lifetime. The exquisite woodcuts of apparatus adorning Guidi's text are copies of the drawings in Guidi's Latin manuscript, which have been claimed, on the basis of a brief reference in the manuscript, to be the work of the Italian mannerist Francesco Primaticcio. However, for both stylistic and logistical reasons, it is more likely that the drawings were made by the school of Francesco [Rosso] Salviati; see Kellett, cited below. The images themselves have been traced back from the Nicetas Codex to the commentary on the Hippocratic treatise Peri arthron (On the joints) composed in the first century B.C.E. by Apollonius of Kitium. 

Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration (1920)  211-212.  Kellett, "The School of Salviati and the Illustrations to the Chirurgia of Vidius Vidius, 1544," Medical History 2 (1958), 264-268. Mortimer, Harvard College Library Department of Printing and Graphic Arts Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts Part I. French Sixteenth Century Books (1964) no. 542. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 954.

Belgian engraver, mathematical and surgical instrument maker, Thomas Geminus (Thomas Lambert or Lambrit) publishes Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio in London.

Geminus's Compendiosa was a slightly abridged version of Vesalius's Epitome illustrated with figures from both the Fabrica and the Epitome re-engraved in copperplate by Geminus. Geminus's work introduced Vesalian anatomy to England, filling an important need by providing a summary view of Vesalius's anatomical discoveries more complete than the Epitome, less bulky and expensive than the Fabrica, and illustrated-- via the new medium of copperplate engraving-- with a clarity of line impossible even for the highly skilled wood engravers employed by Vesalius. However, publication of the Compendiosa was not authorized by Vesalius, who complained about it bitterly in his China-Root Epistle (1546), so that even though Geminus declared Vesalius's authorship in the headline on leaf A1, the Compendiosa has always been considered the first of the many plagiarisms of Vesalius's anatomical works.

Geminus emigrated to England about 1540, where he practiced the arts of engraving, printing and instrument making. There is also an assertion that Germinus may have served, despite his lack of formal training, as royal physician to Henry VIII; however, that is less likely. Later in life Geminus was a printer, and it has hard to imagine how he would have had time for  engraving, instrument making, and printing as well as medical practice.

Geminus introduced to the English the use of copperplate engraving for book illustration, a technique he probably brought from his native Belgium.  A few months before the publication of the Compendiosa, Geminus produced the first engraved book illustrations published in England: two small copperplates, also copied from Vesalius, made for Thomas Raynalde's 1545 revision of The Byrth of Mankynde. The Compendiosa, with its forty copperplates, was the second English book illustrated with copperplates, and the first to contain an engraved title-page. Hind called this elaborate and elegant plate the "first engraving of any artistic importance produced in England." 

Encouraged by the success of his Latin edition of Vesalius, Geminus was persuaded, possibly by Vesalius's old roommate John Caius, to prepare a version of the Vesalian plates with English text for the benefit of "unlatined surgeons." As he doubted his proficiency in English, Geminus sought the aid of schoolmaster and dramatist Nicholas Udall, to translate the characterum indices of the Vesalian plates. The English text chosen to accompany the plates was an early translation of the Surgery of Henry de Mondeville, which Thomas Vicary, surgeon to Henry VIII, had used almost word for word in his own Anatomie of the Bodie of Man (1548). The text was rearranged in Geminus's book to follow the traditional order of conducting a dissection, beginning with the viscera and ending with the bones in order to dissect first those parts which would putrefy most rapidly. The English versions of Geminus's Compendiosa are particularly rare. Copies of the first English Compendiosa exist in two versions: the earlier has no date on the engraved title, while the later has the date "1553" in the lower right corner of the framed title on the engraved title-leaf.

Hind, Engraving in England in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries I (1952) 39-58. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 886.

Andreas Vesalius publishes Rationem modumq[ue] propinandi radicis Chynae decocti. . . . in Basel at the press of Johannes Oporinus. 

In this work on the discovery and therapeutic use of the china root (Smilax chinae) in the treatment of syphilis, Vesalius described the first attempt to formulate methods of identification of an exotic drug. He also offered physicians means of detecting adulteration of the china root, which was coming into common use.

Vesalius devoted most of the China-Root Epistle to a defense of his anatomical methods and doctrines as described in the Fabrica (1543). The work also contains important autobiographical data, including Vesalius's remarks about his teaching experiences at Pisa, his destruction of some of his early manuscripts (a disgusted reaction to the Fabrica's reception), and information concerning his medical forebears.

Cushing, Bio-Bibliography of Vesalius (1943) vii.-1. 1. O'Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (1965) 187-224. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 2141.

Melchior Schedel, grandson of the 15th century Nuremberg physician, writer, and book collector, Hartmann Schedel, sells about 370 manuscripts and 600 printed works from Hartmann Schedel’s library to Johann Jakob Fugger.

Fugger sold his library to Duke Albert V of Bavaria in 1571.

Hartmann Schedel is best known as the author of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). His library, one of the largest formed by an individual in the 15th century, is mostly preserved in the Bayerische Staasbibliothek in Munich.

Michael Servetus (Miguel Servet, Miguel Serveto), Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and humanist, having exchanged unfriendly correspondence with John Calvin concerning theological disputes, publishes secretly in Vienne, France, his book entitled Christianismi restitutio.

This work on the reform of Christianity developed a nontrinitarian Christology which Calvin and the Catholic church considered heretical.  On pp. 168-73 the book also contained the first printed description of the lesser or pulmonary circulation of the blood. The lesser circulation had previously been discovered by Ibn-Al-Nafis in his commentary on the anatomy of the Canon of Avicenna published in manuscript in 1268, but this was not rediscovered until the 20th century. (Re Ibn-Al-Nafis see J. Norman (ed) Morton's Medical Bibliography 5th ed. [1991] no. 753.)

"On 16 February 1553, Servetus, while in Vienne, was denounced as a heretic by Guillaume Trie, a rich merchant who had taken refuge in Geneva and was a very good friend of Calvin, in a letter sent to a cousin, Antoine Arneys, living in Lyon. On behalf of the French inquisitor Matthieu Ory, Servetus as well as Arnollet, the printer of Christianismi Restitutio, were questioned, but they denied all charges and were released for lack of evidence. Arneys was asked by Ory to write back to Trie, demanding proof. On March 26, 1553, the letters sent by Servetus to Calvin and some manuscript pages of Christianismi Restitutio were forwarded to Lyon by Trie. On April 4, 1553 Servetus was arrested by the Roman Catholic authorities, and imprisoned in Vienne. He escaped from prison three days later. On June 17, he was convicted of heresy by the French inquisition, 'thanks to the 17 letters sent by Jehan Calvin, preacher in Geneva, 'and sentenced to be burned with his books. An effigy and his books were burned in his absence" (Wikipedia article on Michael Servetus, accessed 02-05-2009).

Numerous accounts of Servetus' execution state that he was burned along with the entire edition of his book. Even if that was not the case virtually the entire printing of 1000 copies was destroyed, as only three copies of the original edition survive— Richard Mead's copy in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a copy in the Imperial Library, Vienna, and a copy lacking the title page and the first 16pp., said to be John Calvin's personal copy, in the library of William Hunter at the University Library, Edinburgh.   (J. Norman (ed). Morton's Medical Bibliography 5th ed. [1991] no. 754.)

♦ Though Servetus escaped execution with his books, he was arrested in Geneva a few months later after having attended one of Calvin's sermons, and he was sent to trial. On October 24, 1553 Servetus was sentenced to death by burning for denying the Trinity and infant baptism. When Calvin requested that Servetus be executed by decapitation rather than fire, Farel, in a letter of September 8, chided Calvin for undue leniency, and the Geneva Council refused his request. On October 27 Servetus was burned at the stake just outside Geneva with what was believed to be the last copy of his Christianisimi restitutio chained to his leg. Historians record his last words as: "Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have mercy on me." (Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Michael Servetus).

In the year of his death Italian physician and surgeon Realdo Colombo publishes De re anatomica libri XV in Venice. 

Colombo is best known for his discovery of the pulmonary or lesser circulation, i.e., the passage of blood from the right cardiac ventricle to the left via the lungs. Although this discovery was first published in the Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano (1556) by Colombo's friend and former pupil Juan Valverde de Hamusco, the evidence in both Valverde's and Colombo's accounts indicates that the discovery was Colombo's, made through his vivisectional observations of the heart and pulmonary vessels. Colombo's account of the pulmonary circuit was preceded by that in Michael Servetus's Christianismi restitutio, and by the thirteenth-century account of  Ibn al-Nafis. However, because Servetus's Christianismi restitutio (1553) was completely supressed, and Ibn al-Nafis' work was not published in print until the early 20th century, there is no evidence that either was available to Colombo at the time.

Colombo's observations of the heart also enabled him to gain a more correct understanding of the phases of the heartbeat, generally confused by his predecessors, who erroneously likened the heart's action to the expansive action of a bellows. Although overshadowed by his discovery of the pulmonary circulation, Colombo's observations of the heartbeat apparently directly inspired Harvey's vivisectional studies on the heart, which in turn led to his discovery of the greater circulation.

Colombo evidently died during the printing of his work, since in most copies his original dedication letter to Pope Paul IV (who also died while the work was in progress) has been replaced with a dedication to Pope Pius IV by Colombo's two sons, mentioning their father's recent demise. According to tradition, the work was to have been illustrated by Michelangelo; however, Michelangelo left no drawings or any other evidence that he ever seriously considered the task, and we can only speculate as to what sort of artistic masterpiece he might have produced. Colombo's book was published without illustrations except for the woodcut title, which was inspired by that of Vesalius's Fabrica. Schultz (p. 103) points out that the dangling right arm of the cadaver in the title-page woodcut recalls Donatello's bas-relief, The Heart of the Miser.

Schultz, Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy (1985) 102-104. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 501.

Physician, botanist, bibliographer, and naturalist Konrad Gesner (Gessner) publishes In hoc volumine continentur Valerii Cordi Simesusij annotationes in pedacij Dioscordis . . . Stirpium lib. IIII. posthumi . . . Sylva . . . De artificiosis extractionibus liber . . . Compositiones medicinales. His accedunt Stocchornii et Nessi in Bernatium Helvetiorum ditione montium . . . Conradi Gesneri de hortis germaniae liber recens . . . omnia summo studio atque industria doctis. atque excellentiss. viri Conr. Gesneri medici Tigurini collecta, & praefationibus illustrata.

Containing descriptions of about 500 plants, Valerius Cordus’s Historiae stirpium represents the earliest effort to systematize botanical description; Cordus has been called the inventor of phytography. “To read [Cordus’s] description of plants after those of his predecessors and contemporaries is like entering a new world. Each description follows a regular pattern and almost always includes, in this order, the characteristic features of stem and leaves, the flower and time of flowering, the fruit and seeds, the number of loculi in the fruit, the lines of dehiscence, the appearance and the number of rows of seed, the root, whether annual or perennial, taste and smell, and habitat. Cordus thus established in principle the basis for scientific plant description and his transforming influence is evident in most of the leading botanists who followed him” (Morton, History of Botanical Science, p. 126). Gesner, who was sent the manuscript of Historiae stirpium several years after Cordus’s death, recognized the revolutionary nature of Cordus’s work, describing it as “truly extraordinary because of the accuracy with which the plants are described” (Greene, Landmarks of Botanical History, 373).

Cordus’s De artificiosis extractionibus liber, a treatise on the preparation of both simple and compound drugs, published for the first time in this work, contains the first written and published account of the synthesis of sulfuric ether (sweet oil of vitriol)  from sulfuric acid and alcohol on ff. 226v-229r. Cordus is credited with having discovered sulfuric ether circa 1540, four years before his premature death at the age of 29. Paracelsus also wrote about ether in the 1540s; however, his brief discussion of ether was not published until 1605. There is also some speculation that the Arabs, who were the first to distill alcohol and sulfuric acid, may have synthesized ether as early as the 10th century, though no record of this has survived. Cordus described ether's high volatility and noted correctly that “ether promotes the flow of mucous secretion from the respiratory tract and that it affords relief from whooping cough” (Faulconer & Keys, Foundations of Anesthesiology, 267). Cordus also listed several other ailments for which ether was recommended, although he did not mention its soporific effects.

Cordus was the son of German physician and botanist Euricius Cordus, who was the first to establish botany on a scientific basis in Germany. Valerius studied botany and pharmacy under his father and at Wittenburg University, where he gave lectures on the Materia medica of Dioscorides and performed original botanical and pharmacological research based on his own observations (a novelty at the time). Valerius Cordus’s promising career was cut short by his death at the age of 29, but he left a number of works in manuscript which were published after his death, partly from finished manuscripts and partly from notes taken by his students.

The first of Cordus’s works to be published were Pharmacorum omnium . . . vulgo vocant Dispensatorium pharmacopolarum (Nuremberg, 1546; Germany’s first official pharmacopeia), and his Annotationes . . . in Dioscoridis de materia medica, which was included in Pedanii Dioscoridis . . . de medicinali materia libri sex (Frankfurt, 1549; ed. Walther Hermann Ryff), and also appeared in Euricius Cordus’s Botanologicon (Paris, 1551). The Annotationes includes descriptions of the opium poppy and of mandrake (mandragora), a plant containing several narcotic alkaloids (see ff. 66-67). Mandrake’s soporific and anesthetic properties were known in the ancient world, and both mandrake and opium were key ingredients in the medieval “spongia somnifera,” a sponge soaked in a decoction of several herbs which was applied to the patient’s nostrils in order to produce surgical anesthesia. This method of anesthesia was largely ineffectual, however, and went out of use before the end of the 17th century. The publication of Cordus’s remaining works was largely due to the efforts of Gesner. The published volume contains the first editions of four works—Historiae stirpium libri IV; Sylva . . . ; De artificiosis extractionibus liber; and Compositiones medicinales—as well as the third edition of the Annotationes. To this collection Gesner added two works of his own, including De tulipa turcarum, the first scientifically accurate account of the tulip, which had been introduced to Europe only a few years earlier. Gesner also was responsible for issuing Cordus’s Stirpium descriptionis liber quintus in 1563.

Italian physician and anatomist Gabriele Fallopio (Fallopius) publishes Observationes anatomicae in Venice: a work of 232 leaves printed in the comparatively small octavo format, with no illustrations.

Observationes anatomicae was the only work Fallopio published before his death from tuberculosis at age thirty-nine, and is thus the only one that can be said to be fully authentic. The remainder of Falloppio's works were edited for publication from his lecture notes, and may represent more or less than the author's original intent. The Observationes was not an all-inclusive textbook of anatomy but rather a detailed critical commentary on Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica (1543), in which Falloppio attempted to correct the earlier work's errors and add material that Vesalius had overlooked; for this reason, there was no need for illustrations. The large amount of new material included Falloppio's investigations of primary and secondary centers of ossification, the first clear description of primary dentition, numerous contributions to the study of the muscles (especially those of the head), and the famous account of the uterine ("Falloppian") tubes, which he correctly described as resembling small trumpets (tubae). He also gave to the placenta and vagina their present scientific names, provided a superior description of the auditory apparatus (including the first clear accounts of the chorda tympani and semicircular canals), and was the first to clearly distinguish the trochlear nerve of the eye. Vesalius responded positively to Fallopio's work with his posthumously published Examen on Fallopio (1564).

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 757.

Physician, naturalist, and bibliographer, Conrad Gessner (Gesner) issues his Prologomena in Galenum, in tres partes divisa in volume one of Cl [audius] Galeni Pergameni [Opera] Omnia, quae extant, in Latinum sermonem convers published in Basel by Hieronymus Froben and Nicolaus Episcopius. 

Gessner's work on the many and complicated writings of the second century CE physician, Galen of Pergamon, was the first bio-bibliography, and Gessner's most developed bibliography, covering Greek editions, Latin editions, lost works, writers on Galen, and a classified bibliography of Galen's writings. The bio-bibliography occupies 37 unnumbered leaves, following the title to volume 1, and Gesner's two unnumbered leaves of dedication, dated February 1562. (α†^4-6,β†⁶, γ†⁶, A†-C†⁶, D†⁴).

Besterman, Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography 2nd ed (1940) 19-20, no. XXIX.

Italian physician and anatomist Bartolomeo Eustachi (Eustachius) publishes in Venice his Opuscula anatomica, with annotations by his relative and disciple Pier Matteo Pini. It includes 8 engraved full-page text illustrations probably drawn by Eustachi and Pier Matteo Pini, and engraved by Giulio de Musi. Pini also prepared the 168 pages of annotations to Eustachi's anatomical treatises. The illustrations are on the unnumbered pages between pp. 1-20 (first series). These plates are the first 8 in the series of 47 anatomical plates that Eustachi and Pini prepared in 1552, and the only ones of that series published during Eustachi's lifetime.

In 1562 and 1563 Eustachi wrote a series of anatomical treatises on the kidneys (De renum structura), the organ of hearing (De auditus organis), the venous system (De vena quae azygos graecis dicitur) and the teeth (De dentibus), which he issued together under the title Opuscula anatomica. The treatise on the kidney, the first work devoted specifically to that organ, showed a detailed knowledge of the kidney surpassing any earlier work; it contained the first account of the adrenal (suprarenal) gland and a correct determination of the relative levels of the kidneys. The treatise on the ear provided the first post-classical account of the Eustachian tube, while the work on the azygos vein contained the first description of the thoracic duct and of the valvula venae in the right ventricle of the heart, the so-called "Eustachian valve." In his treatise on dentistry Eustachi was the first to study the teeth in any great detail: basing his work on the dissection of fetuses and stillborn infants, he gave an important description of the first and second dentitions, described the hard outer tissue and soft inner structure of the teeth, and attempted an explanation of the problem (not yet completely solved) of the sensitivity of the tooth's hard structure. This last work was also issued separately; it bears its own title-leaf dated 1563. 

Had Eustachi's full series of forty-seven anatomical copperplates been published at the time of their completion in 1552, Eustachi would have ranked with Vesalius as a founder of modern anatomy. However, it is quite probable that because of the growing fame of Vesalius' Fabrica (1543, 1555), Eustachi did not consider publication of his remaining plates, or his accompanying manuscript, De dissensionibus ac controversiis anatomicis, worthwhile. The remaining thirty-nine plates were lost for over a century after Eustachi's death but were rediscovered in the hands of a descendant of Pier Matteo Pini by papal physician, cardiologist, and epidemiologist Giovanni Maria Lancisi, who edited them for publication, and published them, along with the previously published eight plates, under the title of Tabulae anatomicae (Rome, 1714). Eustachi's unpublished manuscript did not survive.

Eustachi's plates are stylistically different from other sixteenth century anatomical studies, as they were produced without the conventional sixteenth-century decorative accompaniments and were framed on three sides by numbered rules providing coordinates by which any part of the image could be located. The publisher of the 1714 edition provided an unnumbered plate with graduated scales to be cut out and used as a location aid. The images are generic figures, composites of many anatomical observations, and are mathematically as well as representationally exact. Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration (1920) 200-202. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) nos. 739-40.

Dutch physician and demonologist Johann Weyer publishes De praestigiis daemonum, et incantationibus ac veneficiis, libri V.  In this celebrated exposé of the witchcraft delusion Weyer presented one of the first scientific approaches to the study of mental illness. Defying the authorities of the Inquisition and the doctrines of the Malleus maleficarum (noticed in this database), Weyer asserted the most witches were actually suffering from mental illness. He backed his claim with careful descriptions of a number of case histories from his own clinical experience, containing some of the earliest references to purely psychological treatment. To emphasize the superstitious ignorance of doctors who adhered to demonological theory, Weyer analyzed the effects of the stupefying and hallucinatory drugs used in sixteenth-century medicine, attributing many aspects of witchcraft to their effects. He recognized the relationship between a highly suggestible temperament and mental instability, and described the phenomenon of mass contagion of mental illness.

Like many innovators during the sixteenth century Weyer held positions relative to witchcraft and demonology that were both traditional and new.

"While he defended the idea that the Devil's power was not as strong as claimed by the Christian church in De Praestigiis Daemonum, he defended also the idea that demons did have power and could appear before people who called upon them, creating illusions; but he commonly referred to magicians and not to witches when speaking about people who could create illusions, saying they were heretics who were using the Devil's power to do it, and when speaking on witches, he used the term mentally ill" (Wikipedia article on Johann Weyer, accessed 02-28-2009). 

Weyer "was the first clinical and the first descriptive psychiatrist to leave to succeeding generations a heritage which was accepted, developed, and perfected into an observational branch of medicine. . . . He reduced the clinical problems of psychopathology to simple terms of everyday life and of everyday human, inner experience" (Zilboorg & Henry, A History of Medical Psychology [1941] 228). 

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 2209.

Printer Pedro Ocharte, born Pierre Ocharte in Rouen, France, working in Mexico City, issues Opera medicinalia by the Spanish physician, Francisco Bravo. Ocharte had married the daughter of Juan Pablos, the first printer in the New World, and inherited his equipment. Opera medicinalia includes a woodcut title border and a few botanical woodcuts, including images to distinguish the false sarsaparilla of Mexico from the true Spanish sarsaparilla of Dioscorides. It was the first medical book printed in the Western Hemisphere, and its botanical images were the first illustrations of plants printed in the Western Hemisphere.

Of the original edition only two copies are known, of which the only complete copy is at the Universidad de Puebla, Mexico. In 1862 American bookseller and bibliographer Henry Stevens purchased an incomplete copy at the sale of the library of Guglielmo Libri in London. This he resold to the American collector James Lennox. This copy is preserved in the New York Public Library.

In 1970 London antiquarian booksellers Dawsons of Pall issued a facsimile of the complete Universidad de Puebla copy with a companion volume of commentary by Francisco Guerra. The two volumes were printed on hand-made paper by J. Barcham Green, Ltd. and bound in parchment by Zaehnsdorf in London. The edition was limited to 250 hand-numbered copies.

Dutch physician, anatomist and comparative anatomist Volcher Coiter publishes Externarum et internarum principalium humani corporis partium tabulae . . . .  in Nuremberg. It includes 9 engravings (the first 4 on 2 leaves), all but 2 signed "V. C. D." for "Volcher Coiter delineavit," signifying that they were drawn by the author. The last 2 plates, of the human skeleton, were after the first and third skeleton figures in Vesalius's Fabrica.  The woodcut historiated initials in the work were  from the "Puttenalphabet" by Hans Weiditz, cut in Augsburg in 1531. 

A student under Gabriele Falloppio, Bartoloemo Eustachi , and Ulisse Aldrovandi, Coiter made several important contributions to the study of human anatomy, and was the first to elevate comparative anatomy to the rank of an independent branch of biology. His Externarum et internarum principalium humani corporis partium tabulae is a collection of ten short works, among which are the first monograph on the ear (De auditus instrumento); the earliest study of the growth of the skeleton as a whole in the human fetus (Ossium tum humani foetus . . .); the first descriptions of the spinal ganglia and musculus corrugator supercilii (in Observationum anatomicarum chirurgicarumque miscellanea); and Coiter's epochal (although unillustrated) investigation of the development of the chick in ovo (De ovorum gallinaceorum generationis. . .), based upon observations made over twenty successive days. This last was the first published study of chick embryo development based upon direct observation since the three-period description (after three, ten and twenty days of incubation) given by Aristotle in his Historia animalium two thousand years before.

Coiter was one of the first physicians to draw the illustrations for his own publications, and to take credit for them in print. It is believed that Vesalius may have done some of the simpler illustrations for the Fabrica; however, none of the Fabrica images are signed, and questions concerning their authorship have led to centuries of speculation and debate. Coiter's illustrations of the adult skeleton and skull, after Vesalius, are superior in anatomical detail; and his sketches of fetal skeletons are original. Cole, History of Comparative Anatomy, illustrates a copy of this work with the title-page dated 1572, but the majority of copies probably appeared in 1573, as most of the references cite the later date. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 496.

Physician and bibliographer Pascal Lecoq (Paschalis Gallus) publishes Bibliotheca medica. Sive catalogus illorum, qui ex professor artem medicam in hunc usque annum scriptis illustrarunt.

This was the first systematic medical bibliography with an annotated list of 1224 authors who wrote in Latin, and lists of French, German, and Italian writers, and other material.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 32.

Physician and bibliographer Israel Spach publishes Nomenclator scriptorum medicorum. Hoc est: elenchus eorum qui artem medicam suis scriptis illustrarunt, secundum locos communes ipsius medicinae in Frankfurt.

This was the first attempt at a medical subject bibliography, arranged under very broad subject headings with indexes of authors and subjects.

The collection, recording, and publishing of medical statistics in the form of Bills of Mortality began in England as a result of the epidemic of plague in 1592-93.

"The epidemic of plague, which reached its height in the year 1593, began to be felt in London in the autumn of 1592, and is said to have caused 2000 deaths before the end of the year. On the 7th September, soldiers from the north on their way to Southampton to embark for foreign parts had to pass round London 'to avoid the infection which is much spread abroad' in the city. On the 16th September, the spoil of a great Spanish carrack at Dartmouth could be brough no farther than Greenwich, on account of the contagion in London; no one to go from London to Dartmouth to buy the goods. It was an ominous sign that the infection lasted through the winter; even in mid winter people were leaving London: 'the plague is so sore that none of worth stay about these places.' On the 6th April 1593, one William Cecil who had been kept in the Fleet prison by the queen's command, writes that 'the place where he lies is a congregation of the unwholesome smells of the town, and season contagious, so many have died of the plague.' From a memorial of 1595, it appears that the neighbourhood of Fleet Ditch had been the most infected part of the whole city and liberties in 1593; 'in the last great plague more died about there than in three parishes besides.' The epidemic does not appear to have reached its height until summer. . . .

"Of that London epidemic a weekly record was kept by the Company of Parish Clerks, and published by them beginning with the weekly bill of 21st December, 1592. The clerk of the Company of Parish Clerks, writing in 1665, had the annual bill for 1593 before him, with the plague-deaths and other deaths in each of 109 parishes in alphabetical order, and the christenings as well. For the next two years, 1594 and 1595, he appears to have had before him not only the annual bills but also a complete set of the weekly bills of burials and christenings according to parishes. The same documents were used by Graunt in 1662, and had doubtless been used by John Stow at the time when they were published. The originals are all lost, and only a few totals extracted from them remain on record. . . .

"The London plague of 1592-93 called forth two known publications, an anonymous 'Good Councell against the Plague, showing sundry preservatives. . . to avoyde the infection lately begun in some places of this Cittie' (London, 1592), and the Defensative' of Simon Kellwaye (April, 1593). The dates of these two books show that the alarm had really begun in the end of 1592 and the early months of 1593" (Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain [1891] 352-53).

The earliest surviving copy of the Bills of Mortality is:

True bill of the vvhole number that hath died At London : printed by I.R[oberts]. for Iohn Trundle, and are to be sold at his shop in Barbican, neere Long lane end, [1603]

1 sheet ([1] p.) ;c1⁰. STC (2nd ed.), 16743 1-3.

Conte Ottavio Ruini edits and has published in Bologna, with a dedication to Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini,  Dell'anotomia [sic], et dell'infirmita del cavallo [Book ii: Dell'infirmita del cavallo] by il marchese Carlo Ruini, Bolognese aristocrat, senator, and high-ranking lawyer. 

Ruini's work, was the first book devoted exclusively to the structure of an animal other than man. Following the example of Vesalius, Ruini stressed the importance of "artful instruction" about all parts of the horse's body, the diseases that afflict them, and their cures. The first part of his work gives an exhaustive treatment of equine anatomy, with especially good accounts of the sense organs; it is illustrated with sixty-four full-page woodcuts, of which the last three, showing a stripped horse in a landscape setting, were clearly inspired by the Vesalian "musclemen" plates.

The second part of the work deals with equine diseases and their cures from a traditional Hippocratic-Galenic standpoint. Some scholars, basing their arguments on Ruini's description of the horse's heart and blood vessels, believe that Ruini was active in the discovery of the greater and lesser circulatory systems. This is unlikely, but it is probable that he was one of many at that time who had a notion of the circulation of the blood.

Ruini's work appeared shortly after his death. The unusual rarity of the first edition might be partially explained by fact that a portion of the sheets of the first edition were reissued the following year byprinter Gaspare Bindoni in Venice. Copies of this second issue, which is also rare, contain a cancel title and a different dedication leaf changing the dedication to César, Duke of Vendôme, natural son of Henry IV.

Cole, History of Comparative anatomy, 83-97. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1858.

English scholar and vicar Robert Burton publishes The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up.

This work remains as much a classic of English literature and a profound study of the human condition as it remains a classic of psychiatric literature.

"He wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy largely to write himself out of being a lifelong sufferer from depression. As he described his condition in the preface 'Democritus Junior to the Reader,'

" 'for I had gravidum cor, foetum caput [a heavy heart, hatchling in my head], a kind of imposthume in my head, which I was very desirous to be unladen of.'

"Therefore, the treatise itself was intended as treatment. Again, from the preface:

" 'I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business.'

"However, this sentence may also be interpreted ironically, as Burton is citing a well-known adage of the time. Indeed, the entire preface is quite satirical in nature — at one point Burton pretends to warn melancholy people to avoid his book for fear of exacerbating their symptoms:

" 'Yet one caution let me give by the way to my present or future reader, who is actually melancholy, that he read not the symptoms or prognostics in the following tract, lest by applying that which he reads to himself, aggravating, appropriating things generally spoken to his own person (as melancholy men for the most part do), he trouble or hurt himself, and get in conclusion more harm than good.'

"The parenthetical aside is delightfully tongue-in-cheek. The work, published under the pseudonym Democritus Junior in 1621, was quite popular. In the words of Thomas Warton:

'the author's variety of learning, his quotations from rare and curious books, his pedantry sparkling with rude wit and shapeless elegance ... have rendered it a repertory of amusement and information'.

"Later authors sometimes drew from the work without acknowledgment (such accusations were leveled at Laurence Sterne's book Tristram Shandy). Samuel Johnson considered it one of his favorite books. (He said of it that it 'was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise'.) [Boswell, Life of Johnson]" (Wikipedia article on The Anatomy of Melancholy, accessed 12-26-2009).

From the medical standpoint the work has been characterized as the first psychiatric encyclopedia, since Burton cited nearly 500 medical authors in the course of classifying the myriad causes, forms and symptoms of depression, and describing its various cures. The work is also a literary tour-de-force in the tradition of Renaissance paradoxical literature.

Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 120. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 381.

Burton put the work through five expanded editions during his lifetime. The third edition of 1638 contained an elaborate engraved title containing ten vignette illustrations.

Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus in Frankfurt.

In this work Harvey presented the discovery and experimental proof of the circulation of the blood. Since antiquity, ideas about the physiology and pathology of most parts of the body had been based to an important degree on assumptions made about the function of the heart and blood vessels.  In fundamentally changing the conception of these functions, Harvey pointed the way to reform of all of physiology and medicine. 

Why Harvey chose a European publisher for his book has long provoked speculation-- the most plausible conjecture is that Harvey wanted his book published on the Continent so that it would more easily gain international distribution and acceptance.  His choice of the Frankfurt publisher William Fitzer seems to have arisen from his long acquaintance with Robert Fludd, whose books were then being published by Fitzer.  The physical distance between Harvey and his publisher seems to have precluded Harvey from correcting proofs, as he was compelled to issue an errata leaf with no less than 126 corrections.  Since very few copies of De motu cordis include this errata leaf, it has been argued that it was probably added after a large portion of the edition had already been sold. Even so, Harvey's errata list must have been compiled with some haste, as the Latin text edited by Akenside for the College of Physicians in 1766 contains 246 emendations.  Fitzer had Harvey's book printed on paper of poor quality, which has deteriorated in virtually all surviving copies. The first edition must have been small as only about 68 copies have survived, nearly all in institutions.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine, 1991, no. 1006.

French physician, philanthropist and journalist Théophraste Renaudot organizes a series of weekly public conferences on diverse subjects, including science, called Conférences du Bureau d'Adresse. These were published by the Bureau d'Adresse as Questions traitées ès Conferences du Bureau d'Adresse (5 volumes, 1633-1641).

In 1630 Renaudot founded the Bureau d'Adresse in Paris.

"The Bureau was basically an employment agency combined with an outpatient clinic. Whoever registered there (for 0 to 3 sous, according to his means) received free medical treatment and help in finding jobs, cheap clothing, lodging, and furniture. The Bureau also granted its clients small-scale credits on security and helped them in their dealings with government offices and the law. It kept a card index of people looking for service or offering help. It also kept a current price index. Gradually it branched out into an advertising agency, a travel agency, a messenger service, a horse rental and shop where almost everything could be bought or hired: curios, antiques, domestic animals, houses, estates, geneologies, the services of private tutors, funerals. . . . The Bureau arranged marriages, recruited soldiers, found monks for understaffed monasteries and even planned to deal in academic degrees.

"This traffic in goods and services naturally also involved the traffic in information. With clients from all walks of life and through a network of correspondents the Bureau systematically collected news from home and abroad, which proved very valuable to the government. Indeed this was the main reason for the continuing protection which it received from Père Joseph and Cardinal Richelieu. They not only skimmed off its information, they also used it to influence public opinion. . . .

"Renaudot also made the Bureau into a centre of intellectual life. From 1633 on, he organized weekly 'conferences' in its rooms on the Ile de St. Louis. As in the earlier Renaissance academies, quaestiones were put up for discussion at these meetings which triggered the exchange of opinions, but were not decided by empirical research. . . In other respects these 'conferences' were looking towards the scientific societies of the second half of the 17th century; the discussions were held in the vernacular (French, not Latin); it was forbidden to quote 'authorities'; religious and political topics had to be avoided. Occasionally even experiments wer performed in order to demonstrate some point of discussion. In 1640 Renaudot set up a chemical laboratory. Yet his main interest was not pure science, but its humanitarian and pedagogic application. According to Renaudot's philanthropic principles, the 'conferences' were open to everybody who cared and consequently were not considered to be very prestigious among the intellectual élite" (Stagl, A History of Curiosity [1995] 136-37).

Renaudot's weekly conferences bear some comparison to those of the Invisible College, which preceded the Royal Society; however, they were attended by a considerably larger audience, were much closer to popular science in their orientation, and their speakers remained anonymous in the published reports.

The Conférences predate the Journal des sçavans and the Philosophical Transactions by 30 years. They were collected in book form rather than published as a periodical, and were published in English translation in 1664-65, just as the Royal Society was being formed.

John Graunt, a draper in London, publishes Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made upon the Bills of Mortality.

Basing his work primarily on London's weekly Bills of Mortality, which had been published since 1593, Graunt noted the regularity of certain vital phenomena, such as higher death rates for children under six years of age, constructed the first life expectancy tables, and attempted to use his data to describe various characteristics of populations.

Graunt was well aware of the limitations of his data, however, citing such defects as lack of thoroughness, inadequate disease vocabulary, and dishonest reporting of deaths from certain causes such as syphilis.  His work first established the uniformity and predictability of many important biological phenomena when taken in large numbers, such as the greater number of female babies, the longer lifespans of females, the high mortality among infants.

It has long been debated how much Graunt's friend, the economist William Petty, contributed to the Observations; recent opinion has it that most of the work is Graunt's, although Petty may have made a few contributions. 

Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 144.   Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 933.

René Descartes publishes De homine figuris. . .  in Leiden. He had written the manuscript in French, originally intending it to accompany his Discours sur la méthode (1637) but suppressed it after the condemnation of Galileo in 1633, fearing that his mechanistic view of the human body might be considered heretical. The physician Florentius Schuyl translated Descartes' text into Latin. The edition included 10 engraved plates, including a "dissected" plate of the heart with the interior parts shown by means of lift-up flaps, plus engraved and woodcut text illustrations. Two years later the book first appeared in French in an edition published in Paris, with different illustrations.

This work was the first attempt to cover the whole field of "animal physiology."  It was based upon Descartes's concept of "l'homme machine," an automaton constructed by God to approximate real men as closely as possible.  By using this literary device Descartes was able to avoid the restrictions and encumbrances of traditional physiology and theology, and to explain all physical motions, except for deliberately wilful, rational or self-conscious behavior, in purely mechanical terms. The work is particularly noteworthy for containing "the first descriptive statement of involuntary action which bears a recognizable resemblance to the modern concept of reflex action." Descartes had first used the word "reflex" in a neurophysiological sense in Les passions de l'âme (1649). 

J. Norman (ed.) Morton's Medical Bibliography (1991) no. 574. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 627.

Philosophical Transactions: Giving some Accompt of the Present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious in Many Considerable Parts of the World begins publication in London by the Royal Society.

Philosophical Transactions is the oldest continuously published journal of an academy of science.

On 1 March 1664/5, two years after the granting of its charter, the Royal Society authorized its second secretary, Henry Oldenburg, to publish at his own expense a monthly collection of scientific papers communicated to him either by members of the society or by foreign scientists. Although it was not the earliest scientific periodical, as  Journal des sçavans antedated it by three months,  Philosophical Transactions, with its long papers, book reviews and notices of work in progress, became the primary means of communication between English and Continental scientists, and served as a model for later periodicals issued by scientific academies.

"The first volumes of what is now the world's oldest scientific journal in continuous publication were very different from today's journal, but in essence it served the same function; namely to inform the Fellows of the Society and other interested readers of the latest scientific discoveries. As such, Philosophical Transactions established the important principles of scientific priority and peer review, which have become the central foundations of scientific journals ever since. In 1886, the breadth and scope of scientific discovery had increased to such an extent that it became necessary to divide the journal into two, Philosophical Transactions A and B, covering the physical sciences and the life sciences respectively" (http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/, where all issues of Philosophical Transactions are available online)

Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 148.

Between April 1665 and September 1666 plague kills 75,000 to 100,000 people, up to a fifth of London's population. "The disease was historically identified as bubonic plague, an infection by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, transmitted through a flea vector. The 1665-1666 epidemic was on a far smaller scale than the earlier "Black Death" pandemic, a virulent outbreak of disease in Europe between 1347 and 1353. The Bubonic Plague was only remembered afterwards as the "great" plague because it was one of the last widespread outbreaks in England.

"At the time, the outbreak was blamed upon the French. In early April 1665, two infected French sailors were said to have collapsed and died at the junction of Drury Lane and Long Acre in London. These cases were said to have brought about all subsequent infections. This theory has been largely dismissed as anti-French propaganda. The British outbreak is actually thought to have originated from the Netherlands, where the bubonic plague had occurred intermittently since 1599, with the initial contagion arriving with Dutch trading ships carrying bales of cotton from Amsterdam. The dock areas outside of London, including the parish of St. Giles-in-the Fields where poor workers crowded into ill-kept structures, were the first areas struck by the plague. Personal and public hygiene was very minimal during this period, contributing to the spread of disease. During the winter of 1664-1665, there were reports of several deaths. However, the very cold winter seemingly controlled the contagion. But spring and summer months were unusually warm and sunny, and the plague spread rapidly. As records were not kept on the deaths of the very poor, the first recorded case was a Rebecca Andrews, on April 12, 1665" (Wikipedia article on Great Plague of London, accessed 01-03-2009).

Samuel Green, using a press in Cambridge, Massachusetts owned by the president of Harvard, Henry Dunster, prints the first medical or biological publication in North America--an edition of a London plague tract. The title is: Thomas Vincent's Gods Terrible Voice in the City of London wherein you have the Narration of the Two Late Dreadful Judgements of Plague and Fire, Inflicted by the Lord upon that City; the former in the year 1665. The latter in the year 1666. By T.V. To which is Added, the Generall Bill of Mortality, shewing the Number of Persons which Died in Every Parish of all Diseases, and of the Plague, in the Year Abovesaid. This is known from a single copy preserved at Harvard University. It is also probably the first North American publication on any scientific subject.

The pamphlet was reissued in 1668 by another Cambridge, Masschusetts printer, Marmaduke Johnson. This 31 page pamphlet is known from a single copy preserved in the American Antiquarian Society.

As a result of the burning of his home and the destruction of his library, which included numerous unpublished manuscripts on a wide range of subjects, Danish physician and anatomist, Thomas Bartholin, publishes De bibliothecae incendio, a work of self-consolation. In this work Bartholin recounts examples in history of other library losses through fire, and catalogs and summarizes the vast amount of his intellectual work that was "lost to Vulcan." He also consoles himself with a bibliographical list of his works that had already been published in print, and thus had their content protected from catastrophic loss from fire:

"Books are not so readily exposed to destruction if they have multiplied themselves by the aid of type so that they may be read in more than a thousand copies dispersed throughout the earth, unless this universe which we inhabit be subjected to common ruin or flames spread themselves to all corners of the earth. It is by the benefit of divine art that I am as yet able to collect or seek again from friends or from booksellers my other works which were previously published. If judgment in this matter had been left in the hands of Vulcan, I should be bereft even of this small portion of my books. Unless it is burdensome to the reader, I shall subjoin a catalogue of my personal library constructed from works hitherto published in my name or dedicated to me, which Vulcan consumed with the rest, but with less harm to me since they are available elsewhere." (p. 32).

Bartholin then lists 129 printed works either written and published by him or dedicated to him.  At the end of De bibliothecae incendio Bartholin expresses gratitude that he survived the fire even if his "brain-children" were sacrified, and thanks the king, Christian V, for his support after this tragedy. By this time Bartholin was regarded as the leading physician in Denmark, and because of this tragic accident the king of Denmark freed Bartholin's estate of all taxes and appointed Bartholin his personal physician, with handsome compensation.

♦ Bartholin's work reflects a scholarly perspective very different from our time, and also exhibits what would have to be called credulity, especially with the following reference to Homer written in gold on a dragon's intestine—a story which, according to Bartholin, was repeated by several authorities:

"The library of Constantinople, founded by Theodosius the younger in 473, and a rival to that of Ptolemy [i.e. the Library of Alexandria], in the reign of the Emperor Zeno was consumed by a fire instigated by the leader of the image-breakers, the [later] Emperor Leo the Isaurian. Earlier, in the time of Basilicus Tyrannus, the same library had perished in flames aroused by the plebs in their hatred of Basilicus [Basiliscus], and among the books was the intestine of a dragon twenty feet long on which the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer had been written in letters of gold. But Claudius Clemens in his Bibliothecae Instructio considers that it had been snatched from the conflagration, because when Leo the Isaurian, struck by a mad fury against the sacred images, burned whatsoever volumes had been restored of the thirty-three thousand of the library, Constantinus, Cedrenus, Zonaras and Glycas testify that the intestine was still there, unless perchance, in a kind of veneration a new one had been fashioned in imitation of the former intestine which had perished in the first fire. According to the Annals of Constantinus Manassus [Manasses], translated by Lewenclavius, in which the fire is well described, I am disposed to consider the one instigated by Leo III, the Isaurian, as the first." (p.7.)

Bartholin, On the Burning of His Library and On Medical Travel, translated by C. D. O'Malley (1961) 7, 32. (Bracketed insertions and hyperlinks are my additions.)

Dutch physician, anatomist, poet, and playwright Govert Bidloo publishes Anatomia humani corporis. This large folio contains an engraved title, engraved portrait of Bidloo by Abraham Bloteling after Gérard de Lairesse and 105 engraved plates after Lairesse, probably by Bloteling and Peter and Philip van Gunst. The work was issued in  Amsterdam for the widow of Joannes van Someren, the heirs of Joannes van Dyk, Henry Boom and widow of Theodore Boom.

Considered as an artistic meditation on anatomy, Gerard de Lairesse’s designs are a total departure from the idealistic tradition inaugurated by the Vesalian woodcuts. They are also worlds apart from the productions of the Odoardo Fialetti - Giulio Casserio collaboration. Lairesse displayed his figures with everyday realism and sensuality, contrasting the raw dissected parts of the body with the full, soft surfaces of undissected flesh surrounding them; placing flayed, bound figures in ordinary nightclothes or bedding; setting objects such as a book, a jar, a crawling fly in the same space as a dissected limb or torso. He thus brought the qualities of Dutch still-life painting into anatomical illustration, and gave a new, darker expression to the significance of dissection. De Lairesse’s images of dissected pregnancies and premature infants also reflect compassion—a quality unusual in art that was intended primarily to be scientific.

A painter and writer on art theory, Lairesse was influenced by Rembrandt, who painted his portrait in 1665, and also by the French styles of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. The French called Lairesse the “Dutch Poussin.” Lairesse suffered from congenital syphilis, which gave him a deformed nose visible in Rembrandt’s portrait. Perhaps because he had always lived with disease Lairesse had more than a casual interest in medicine. Syphilis made him blind in 1690, and for the rest of his active life Lairesse supported himself by lecturing and writing about art, publishing two books on drawing and painting which were widely reprinted and translated throughout the eighteenth century.

Some of Lairesse’s drawings were probably engraved by Abraham Bloteling. A line engraver and creator of mezzotint plates who worked in both Holland and England, Bloteling was particularly famous for the quality of his mezzotints, for which he initiated a more thorough system of preparing the grounds, and may have invented the rocker. According to Choulant, Haller and Moehsen believed that some plates in the series were engraved by the brothers Pieter and Philip van Gunst. Despite imperfections from the point of view of dissection, which Choulant and others have pointed out, the Bidloo—de Lairesse anatomical studies reflect much that is good, including early depictions of skin and hair from observation with a microscope.

Bidloo began this project with de Lairesse around 1676 during a period in which he was also writing plays in Amsterdam, obtaining his medical degree, and working as a surgeon. It would appear that Bidloo brought his flair for drama to the conception and realization of this project. The 105 large drawings were probably completed about 1682, after which the plates had to be engraved—a huge production.

Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration (1920) 250. Dumaître, La Curieuse Destiné des Planches Anatomiques de Gérard de Lairesse (1982). Hofer, Baroque Book Illustration, 146. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) No. 231. Roberts & Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body, 309-17. Wax, The Mezzotint: History and Technique (1990) 25-26.

English surgeon and anatomist William Cowper publishes The Anatomy of Humane Bodies. . . .The large folio volume includes a mezzotint portrait of Cowper by Smith after Closterman, an allegorical engraved title attributed to Abraham Bloteling with pasted-on English title in cartouche, a second engraved title with vignette by Sturt, and  114 plates, of which 105 are designed by Gérard de Lairesse and probably engraved by Bloteling, and 9 plates mostly drawn and engraved by Michael van der Gucht. The volume is printed in Oxford at the Sheldonian Theatre and issued in London by Samuel Smith & Benjamin Walford.

This is the first edition in English of the original plates designed for Govert Bidloo by Gérard de Lairesse, a painter who rivaled Rembrandt in popularity in his time. The plates were originally issued with Bidloo's Latin text and published in 1685. (See the entry in this database.) Bidloo’s text, however, was widely criticized, and perhaps because of this Cowper obtained 300 sets of the original plates from the publishers in Amsterdam, and arranged to supply an entirely new text in English to accompany a reissue of the original engravings, with a few additions. The new English text was clearly superior, and the basis for later Latin editions, and Cowper also commissioned nine  new plates. However, Cowper did not acknowledge Bidloo, even going so far as to paste over Bidloo’s name with his own in the cartouche on the engraved allegorical title. This action resulted in a bitter plagiarism dispute between the two-- one of the most famous in medical history. In 1700 Bidloo went so far as to publish his Gulielmus Cowper, criminalis literari citatus, coram tribunali attacking Cowper in considerable detail.  Russell, British Anatomy, 211.

English Physician and comparative anatomist Edward Tyson publishes Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris; or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape and a Man,  including 8 folding plates engraved by Michael Vandergucht after drawings by the artist and anatomist, William Cowper.

Tyson's anatomy of the "orang-outang" (in Tyson's case a chimpanzee rather than an orangutan) was the first work to demonstrate the structural relationships between the anatomy of man and the anthropoid ape. For Tyson the term Orang-Outang meant "man of the woods."

In 1641 the Dutch surgeon and anatomist Nicholas (or Nicolaes) Tulp had used the same words to describe a chimpanzee, which he illustrated in his Observationum medicarum. This book included the first, limited description by a scientist of an African anthropoid ape. Regarding Tulp's description Tyson said that "I confess that I do mistrust the whole representation."

The ape which Tulp described seems to have come from Angola, and Tulp had the opportunity to observe it in the private menagerie of the Prince of Orange. Tulp seems to have learned the name orang-outang from Samuel Blomartio, a friend who had lived in Borneo and was familiar with the Javanese word for "man of the woods." Tulp seems to have been under the impression that orangutans were widely distributed throughout the tropics rather than limited to Asia, and thus confused the two species. The classification of the orangutan in the the Ponginae (Pongo) subfamily of the family hominidae, outside of the subfamily homininae from which humans descend, and to which the chimpanzee belongs, had not yet occurred.

Perhaps with some humor, but also to confirm the anatomical similarities, Tyson had Cowper draw the standing dissected figures of chimpanzees in the style of the famous Vesalian musclemen. A believer in the "Great Chain of Being" or scala naturae, Tyson identified the chimpanzee as the link directly below mankind, stating in his "Epistle Dedicatory" that it "seems the Nexus of the Animal and Rational."

Tyson's anatomical study— the first conducted of a great ape— had a powerful influence on all subsequent thought on man's place in nature. Thomas Huxley referred to it extensively in his 1863 book with that title. Tyson's last section of Orang-Outang is devoted to "A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients," an early contribution to the study of primate-oriented folklore.

Cole, History of Comparative anatomy, 198-221. Montague, Edward Tyson (1943) ch. 8. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 2120.  Spencer, Ecce Homo. An Annotated Bbiliographic History of Physical Anthropology (1986) no. 1.92.

Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch publishes Thesaurus anatomicus in ten parts in Amsterdam from 1701 to 1716, and the first and only part of his Thesaurus animalium in 1710. An index to the Thesaurus anatomicus appeared in 1725.

Probably the most original artist in the history of anatomical preparations, Ruysch enjoyed making up elaborate three-dimensional emblems of mortality from his specimens. These fantastic, dream-like concoctions constructed of human anatomical parts are illustrated in the Thesaurus on large folding plates mostly engraved by Cornelis Huyberts, who also engraved plates for the painter Gérard de Lairesse, illustrator of Govert Bidloo’s anatomy. In their dreamlike qualities many of the plates depicting the preparations reflect surrealism centuries before surrealism became fashionable. Ruysch’s Thesaurus anatomicus and his Thesaurus animalium describe and illustrate the spectacular collections of “Anatomical Treasures” which he produced for display in his home museum between 1701 and 1716 using secret methods of anatomical injection and preservation.

Ruysch's unique anatomical preparations attracted many notables to his museum, including Czar Peter the Great of Russia, who was so fascinated with the preparations that he attended Ruysch’s anatomy lectures, and in 1717 he bought Ruysch’s entire collection, along with that of the Amsterdam apothecary Albert Seba, for Russia's first public museum, the St. Petersburg Kunstkammer. Over the years most of the dry preparations in St. Petersburg deteriorated or disappeared, but some of those preserved in glass jars remain. A few later specimens by Ruysch, auctioned off by his widow after his death, are also preserved in Leiden. Because most of the preparations did not survive, Ruysch’s preparations, and his museum, are known primarily from these publications.

Ruysch's methods allowed him to prepare organs such as the liver and kidneys and keep entire corpses for years. He used a mixture of talc, white wax, and cinnabar for injecting vessels and an embalming fluid of alcohol made from wine or corn with black pepper added. Using his injection methods Ruysch was the first to demonstrate the occurrence of blood vessels in almost all tissues of the human body, thereby destroying the Galenic belief that certain areas of the body had no vascular supply. He was also the first to show that blood vessels display diverse organ-specific patterns. He investigated the valves in the lymphatic system, the bronchial arteries and the vascular plexuses of the heart, and was the first to point out the nourishment of the fetus through the umbilical cord. Ruysch's discoveries led him to claim erroneously that tissues consisted solely of vascular networks, and to deny the existence of glandular tissue. 

Impey & Macgregor (eds.) The Origins of Museums (1985)  55-56. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1875.  Rosamond Purcell & Stephen Gould, Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors (1992) chapter 1 reproduces spectacular color images of Ruysch’s preparations from Czar Peter’s Wunderkammer, and Leiden.  Roberts & Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Human Body (1992) 290-98.

Much as fifteenth century printers viewed printing by moveable type as a less expensive way to reproduce texts that had previously been reproduced by manuscript copying, Jacob Christoph Le Blon viewed his process of color printing as a less expensive way of producing or reproducing color paintings.

In London Le Blon formed a company called The Picture Office to produce color prints. Ludwig Choulant stated that in 1721 Le Blon issued a separate print depicting the male sexual organs entitled Préparation anatomique des parties de l’homme, servants a la generation, faites sur les decouvertes les plus modernes. This print, which I have not seen, may be the first, or among the first, color-printed mezzotints ever published.

Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration (1920) 265-66.

English physician and scientist James Jurin publishes A Letter . . .Containing, a Comparison Between the Mortality of the Natural Small Pox and that Given by Inoculation.

In this work, which is one of the earliest applications of statistics to a particular socio-medical problem, Jurin proved statistically that the fatality of inocculated smallpox is very much less than the fatality of natural smalpox.

J. Norman (ed.) Morton's Medical Bibliography 5th ed (1991) no. 1689.

Bernhard Siegfried Albinus of Leiden publishes Dissertatio de arteries et venis intestinorum hominis. Adjecta icon coloribus distincta containing a color mezzotint printed by the painter Jan Ladmiral.

This was among the earliest applications of color printing, and the first use of color printing in a medical or scientific book. Between 1736 and 1741 Albinus issued six pamphlets containing color mezzotints by Ladmiral , forming the first series of full-color anatomical color-printed illustrations ever made.  They are also the only color prints produced by Jan Ladmiral. Ladmiral had learned the process of color printing from the artist Jacob Christoph le Blon, the inventor of the process for printing color mezzotints using the three primary colors.

Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration (1920)  265-66 for Le Blon, and 267-69 for Ladmiral.

Dutch physician and anatomist Bernhard Siegfried Albinus publishes Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani in Leiden at the printing office of Johan & Hermann Verbeek.

The plates in this large folio work are unsurpassed for their cool, elegant aesthetic and scientific accuracy. They were drawn and engraved by Jan Wandelaar, a pupil of the engravers Jacob Fokema and Guillem van der Gouwen, and the painter Gérard de Lairesse, who prepared the drawings for Govert Bidloo's atlas (referenced in this database). Prior to working for Albinus, Wandelaar worked for anatomist Friedrik Ruysch. Albinus, however, provided Wandelaar with the opportunity for the full expression of his talents as a draftsman and engraver. For many years Wandelaar worked nearly exclusively for Albinus, and lived in Albinus' house, illustrating the long series of superb books which Albinus produced. Choulant states that when Wandelaar died Albinus fell into a severe depression, from which he only gradually recovered. The Tables of the Skeleton and Muscles of the Human Body represents the apogee of an exceptional collaboration between physician and artist which lasted from 1721 until the artist's death in 1754, and resulted in a series of unsurpassed publications.

Roberts and Tomlinson described the innovative method that Wandelaar and Albinus devised for the transfer of the most accurate and proportional images of the anatomy to the drawings, using two nets, or grids, of small cords. The first plates are finished representations of the skeleton and are each accompanied by an outline-plate of the same size. The following 9 plates represent complete finished musclemen, each with an additional outline plate. The 14 plates following these represent special muscles and parts of muscles. Each of the very numerous figures on these last 14 plates is supplied with an outline-drawing unless the letters are engraved directly upon the finished figures. There are a total of 40 plates.

The 3 finished plates of the skeleton and the 9 finished muscle men are some of the most beautiful plates in the history of engraving. Wandelaer placed each figure in a carefully chosen landscape setting, and the artistic results are so pleasantly successful that the anatomical figures, although composed of many separate parts, appear to be actually stepping out of the picture.

Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration (1920) 276-83. Roberts & Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Human Body (1992) 320-339. J. Norman (ed) Morton's Medical Bibliography (1991) No. 399. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) No. 29. Sappol, Dream Anatomy (2006) 118-19.

Sugita Genpaku and colleagues publish Kaitai Shinsho (Anatomical Tables) in Tokyo.

This translation into Japanese of Johann Adam Kulmus's Dutch text on anatomy was the first work on Western medicine and science published in Japanese.

As the first translation into Japanese of a Western medical text, "Kaitai Shinsho represented the beginning of two epoch-making developments. First and most directly Gempaku's work set in motion the modern transformation of Japanese medicine, revealing not only many anatomical structures hitherto unknown in traditional medicine, but also and more fundamentally introducing the very notion of an anatomical approach to the body--the idea of visual inspection in dissection as the primary and most essential way of understanding the nature of the human body. Second and more generally, Kaitai Shinsho inspired the rise of Dutch studies (Rangaku) in Japan, thus giving birth to one of the most decisive influences shaping modern Japanese history, namely the study of Western languages and science" (S. Kuriyama, " Between Mind and Eye: Japanese Anatomy in the Eighteenth Century," IN: Leslie & Young (eds.) Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge [1992] 21.

Kaitai Shinsho was drawn largely from Gerard Dieten's 1773 Dutch translation of Johann Adam Kulmus's Anatomische Tabellen (1731) although its Western-style title-age was copied from Valverde's Vivae imagines partium porporis (1566), and the last four anatomical woodcuts were taken from the 1690 Dutch edition of Bidloo's anatomy. According to Genpaku, the instigator and primary editor of the book, the inspiration for Kaitai Shinsho came in 1771 when he and two other students of Dutch medicine bribed an executioner to let them see the dismembered body of a criminal. The three compared what they saw to the anatomical illustrations in Kulmus's book, and, struck by the accuracy of the European representations, determined to prepare a Japanese edition of Kulmus's anatomy. Completed in just two years, the book was a sensation on publication, selling out almost immediately and going through numerous editions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

After publication of Kaitai Shinsho Genpaku continued to help advance Western knowledge in Japan. In 1815 he published a chronicle of these advances entitled Rangaku Kotohajime (The Dawn of Western Science in Japan).

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1196.

J. Norman, Anatomy as Art: The Dean Edell Collection, NY: Christie's, 5 October 2007, no. 106.

Lorenz von Crell (1744–1816), professor of theoretical medicine and materia medica at the University of Helmstedt, Germany, begin's publication of  the first periodical specifically devoted to chemistry: Chemische Annalen für die Freunde der Naturlehre, Arzneygelahrtheit, Haushaltungskunst und Manufacturen. 

The journal continued publication under this name until 1781. It resumed publication in 1784 with the title of Chemische Annalen, discontinuing publication in 1803. The journal is often called referred to as Crell's Annalen. 

French painter Jacques Gamelin issues from Toulouse Nouveau recueil d'ostéologie et de myologie, dessin‚ d'après nature. . . pour l'utilit‚ des sciences et des arts. The folio volume, made up of 128 unfolded single sheets, includes 90 engraved plates, and text vignettes engraved in a variety of techniques by Gamelin and his pupils Lavallée and Martin after Gamelin's original drawings.

Gamelin is known for his paintings and engravings of battle scenes. The plates for his anatomical atlas, issued in an edition of only 200 copies, were prepared from drawings made at his own dissection facility; they are distinct from the plates of other works of its type, being larger, more artistically varied, and more expressive and fantastic in their conceptions. "The work is known for its display of both talent and imagination, with striking scenes of the Resurrection, the Crucifixion, and skeletons at play. Aside from the full-page copperplate illustrations by Gamelin and the engraver Lavalée, the work contains a number of intriguing vignettes on the title pages and elsewhere, which show battle scenes, visitations by death on unsuspecting revelers, and the anatomical artist's studio" (Wikipedia article on Jacques Gamelin, accessed 02-08-2009).

Gamelin's plates show a constant interplay between the artistic and the anatomic: emblematic images in the seventeenth-century tradition, vignettes in the coquettish eighteenth-century manner, and classic studies of figures in repose and movement vie with straightforward "medical" depictions of bones and muscles. Gamelin's technical perfection, coupled with the emotional and fantastical elements in his images, have led him to be seen as a precursor of Goya; it is possible that the young Goya may have known or studied with Gamelin, who taught in Rome during the time Goya was there. 

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 872.

William Withering publishes in Birmingham and London An account of the foxglove, and some of its medical uses. . . .

An accomplished botanist as well as a physician, Withering conducted the first clinical trials of the ground-up leaves of the purple foxglove—a traditional folk-remedy, discovering the efficacy of digitalis in heart diseases. Digitalis remains one of the few drugs introduced as early as the eighteenth century that remains widely used today.

Withering's work contains the results of ten years of observations and clinical trials, of the drug which he first learned about from an old woman herbalist in 1775. Of the 158 patients he treated with the foxglove, 101, who suffered from congestive heart failure, experienced relief after treatment with the drug, which is today known as digitalis after the foxglove’s Latin name, Digitalis purpurea. Modern analysis of Withering’s case reports suggests that many of the 57 other cases, such as those with pulmonary tuberculosis, did not involve diseases amenable to treatment with digitalis. Withering himself was aware that these factors might be affecting his results and warned against generalizing on the basis of his cases. Over the ten years of his researches on digitalis, Withering derived what he believed to be the optimum quantity of a single dosage—an amount only slightly less active than the tablet used in contemporary practice. The incidence of side effects of the drug declined as Withering gained clinical experience; Estes and White observed that “it appears that the overall incidence of side effects attributable to digitalis in Withering’s patients approximates the incidence recorded by physicians today. One could learn to use digitalis effectively and safely if one had no other text than Withering’s Account of the Foxglove.” Withering honestly recorded both successes and failures in his trials. He stressed that care must be taken in adjusting the dose, and he accurately described the signs and symptoms of digitalis toxicity and established clear guidelines for its rational use. Despite Withering’s modest but definite claims for the efficacy of the foxglove, the drug became a kind of panacea for nineteenth century clinicians.

Le Fanu, Notable Medical Books in the Lilly Library 139 points out that the folding frontispiece is colored in some copies but not in all. There are two versions of the plate: one, with artist’s name and with lower leaves pointing to the left, was copied from the original which James Sowerby had engraved for William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis; the other is the original version borrowed from Curtis, without artist’s name and with lower leaves pointing to the right.

Estes & White, “William Withering and the purple foxglove,” Scientific American 212 (1965), 110-119.  Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 2255. 

Around this time publication of scientific and medical books in Latin— the international language of scholarship, religion, and science since the Roman Empire— for the most part ceased. From the nineteenth century onward most scientific and medical books were published in their vernacular language of authorship, or in French, German or English.

English tailor, economist and political radical Francis Place publishes Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population: Including an Examination of the Proposed Remedies of Mr. Malthus, and a Reply to the Objections of Mr. Godwin and Others. 

Place's book was the foundation work of the birth-control movement. 

“Though many preceded Francis Place in discussing the technique of contraception, he seems to have been the first to venture, at first alone and unaided, upon an organized attempt to educate the masses. Place, holds, therefore, the same position in social education on contraception that Malthus holds in the history of general population theory . . . it was Place who first gave birth control a body of social theory” (Himes, Medical History of Contraception [1930], 212-13). 

Place, the son of an alcoholic London bailiff, overcame enormous economic hardship to become a successful master tailor. In his free time he taught himself mathematics, the law, history and economics; he also became involved in British radical politics, associating with such influential figures as Joseph Hume, Thomas Wakely, Sir Francis Burdett, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.  David Ricardo had sent Place a copy of Malthus's work and Place sent Ricardo the manuscript of his book for comments in September 1821 to which Ricardo replied in a lengthy letter to Place dated September 9, 1821.

Place’s Illustrations and Proofs arose from the long-standing controversy between Thomas Malthus and the utopian socialist William Godwin over the nature of human society. Godwin held that there was no limit on human perfectibility, and that society, if freed from the evils of government and other man-made institutions, would advance to an ideal state, free of poverty and governed entirely by reason. Malthus countered Godwin’s utopian claims with his famous Essay on the Principle of Population (1798 and subsequent editions), in which he argued that humanity’s improvement was necessarily limited by the constant struggle between a population’s natural tendency to increase (which was not susceptible to control by reason) and the restraints on population growth, such as famine and disease, imposed by scarce resources. In the second edition of the Essay (1803) Malthus proposed that poverty and other miseries caused by these opposing pressures on populations could be mitigated by voluntary growth-limiting measures such as “moral restraint”; i.e. delayed marriage and sexual continence prior to marriage. Malthus explicitly condemned artificial methods of contraception, however, claiming they were unnatural and would lead to immorality.

Although a supporter of Malthus’s views on population, Place emphatically disagreed with Malthus’s condemnation of birth control. His own life experience had given him first-hand knowledge of both grinding poverty and licentious behavior, and he knew how hopeless a task it was to persuade England’s poor to refrain from sex until they were economically prepared to support a family. His own early marriage, at the age of 19, had rescued him from a life of debauchery; however, “experience . . . emphatically warned him that early marriage meant many children” (quoted in Hime, Introduction, p. 10)—a situation that kept poor families in poverty and led to such social evils as prostitution and child labor. “Thus it was that Place came to be dominated by the compelling persuasion, an opinion that amounted to an idée fixe, that Malthus’s remedy was impracticable, that it was as utopian in its own way . . . as Godwin’s notions of perfectibility. And thus it was that Place, feeling that he had a distinctive contribution to make to the discussion of population problems . . . came out unequivocally [in Illustrations and Proofs] for contraception as the best ‘means of preventing the numbers of mankind from increasing faster than food is provided’” (Himes, Introduction, p. 11). “It was a daring innovation in the history of economic thought . . . when, in 1822, Place published his Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population, the first treatise on population in English to propose contraceptive measures as a substitute for Malthus’s ‘moral restraint’” (Himes, Medical History of Contraception, p. 213).

Place’s Illustrations sold poorly, which prompted him to use more direct methods of communicating his message. In 1823 he began distributing handbills advocating contraception, addressed to “The Married of Both Sexes,” “The Married of Both Sexes in Genteel Life,” and “The Married of Both Sexes of the Working People.” These “received considerable circulation not only in London, but in the industrial districts of the North; while the discussions which ensued caused them to be reprinted in several radical journals of the period . . . the handbills were in advance of modern medical opinion in maintaining that economic indications held a coordinate place with medical indications for contraception” (Himes, Medical History of Contraception, 213, 218).

Himes, “Editor’s introduction,” in Place, Illustrations and Proofs of the Principles of Population, ed. Himes (1930; repr. 1967), 7-63; Medical History of Contraception (1936), 212-20. J. Norman (ed) Morton's Medical Bibliography no. 1696.1.

Physician and physiologist William Frederic Edwards publishes De l'influence des agents physiques sur la vie,  a founding work of animal ecology.

Edwards's main idea was that vital processes depend on external physical and chemical forces but are not entirely controlled by them. Life is different from heat, light, or electricity, forces which, however, contribute to the production of vital phenomena. Edwards systematically examined all principal functions, mostly of vertebrate species; and by varying the external conditions, he de­termined the nature and degree of their modification. Among the phenomena he studied were the minimum and maximum tem­peratures compatible with life; heat production in young and adult animals; resistance of young animals to cold and to lack of oxygen.

The Eighth Surgeon General of the United States Army Joseph Lovell purchases books and journals, establishing the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, also called the Library of the Surgeon General of the Army.

In 1840 the library issued its first catalogue as a manuscript notebook. This library eventually evolved into the National Library of Medicine.

Christian Doppler publishes Über das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne und einige andere Gestirne des Himmels. (On the Colored Light of the Binary Stars and Some Other Stars of the Heavens).

This was the first statement of the Doppler principle, which states that the observed frequency changes if either the observer or the source is moving. Doppler mentions the application of this principle to both acoustics and optics, particularly to the colored appearance of double stars and the fluctuations of variable stars and novae; however, his reasoning in the optical arguments was flawed by his erroneous belief that all stars were basically white and emitted light only or mostly in the visible spectrum. Five years later, the astronomer Hippolyte Fizeau will publish a paper announcing his independent discovery of the effect, noting the usefulness of observing spectral line shifts in its application to astronomy. This point was of such fundamental importance to Doppler's principle that it is sometimes called the Doppler-Fizeau principle. The acoustical Doppler effect will be verified experimentally in 1845, and the optical effect in 1901. Modified by relativity theory, it will become one of the major tools of astronomy. It also has numerous commerical applications beyond astronomy, such as in Doppler radar and in Doppler ultrasound imaging to evaluate blood flow.

Doppler, [Johann] Christian., "Über das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne und einige andere Gestirne des Himmels," Abhandlungen der k. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Series 5, 2 (1842).

American surgeon Henry Jacob Bigelow publishes "Insensibility during Surgical Operations Produced by Inhalation," Boston Medical  and Surgical  Journal XXXV, no. 16 (November 18, 1846): 309-17,

This was the first formal announcement of the discovery of surgical anesthesia, probably the greatest medical discovery made in America during the nineteenth century. The Boston dentist W. T. G. Morton, after experimenting with ether anesthesia in his dental practice, obtained permission from John Collins Warren, chief of surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, to attempt anesthesia on a surgical patient. On October 16, with Morton administering the ether, Warren successfully removed a portion of a vascular tumor from the neck of his patient. The following day, Morton again administered ether to a patient undergoing an operation to remove a fatty tumor from her arm. At this point the surgeons at Massachusetts General refused to employ Morton’s “Letheon” any further unless Morton revealed its exact nature—which he had hitherto kept secret in the hopes of patenting it—and allowed its free use at the hospital.

On November 6, on the advice of Henry J. Bigelow, Morton at last divulged that his “Letheon” was in fact sulfuric ether. On November 7, Morton administered ether to a patient undergoing amputation of the leg; with the success of this operation, “the value of ether as an anesthetic was established once and for all.”  Norman, One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine, 64A. Wolfe, Tarnished Idol,  75-83. 

German physician and physiologist Carl Friedrich Wilhem Ludwig publishes "Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Einflusses der Respirationsbewegungen auf den Blutlauf im Aortensysteme" in Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medizin (1847) 242-302.

This was the Ludwig's first description of his kymograph, the first instrument to record scientific information in graphic form in real time, which Ludwig created by modifying Poiseuille’s hemodynamometer so that it could record its results graphically. This device, further modified by Marey and Chaveau, became a standard tool for the graphic recording of experimental results; it is illustrated in Ludwig's plated numbered 10 in the journal volume. 

Ludwig's paper was accompanied by 5 plates showing the apparatus and its method of graphic recording on a metal drum covered with smoked paper which was scratched with a moving stylus, leaving smoke-free lines. These paper sheets were then removed from the drum and fixed with varnish to preserve the record.

J. Norman (ed). Morton's Medical Bibliography 5th ed (1991) no. 770.

English physician Thomas Addison publishes On the Constitutional and Local Effects of Disease of the Suprarenal Capsules. 

This beautiful monograph in small folio format with 11 hand-colored lithographs inaugurated the study of diseases of the ductless glands and the disturbances in chemical equilibrium known as pluriglandular syndromes.

Addison chanced upon adrenal disease while searching for the causes of pernicious anemia. His initial paper on the subject. entitled "On Anemia: Disease of the Suprarenal Capsules" (1849), attempted to link the two diseases. 

Addison's 1855 monograph focused on diseases of the suprarenal capsules and contains the classic description of the endocrine disturbance known as "Addison's disease" (also known as chronic adrenal insufficiency, hypocortisolism, and hypocorticism). Addison was also the first to suggest that the adrenal glands are essential for life, and his monograph inspired a burst of experimental research that led, among other things, to Edmé Félix Alfred Vulpian's discovery of adrenalin one year later, in 1856.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 8.

U.S. Army Surgeon General William A. Hammond establishes the Army Medical Museum during the American Civil War as a center for the collection of specimens for research in military medicine and surgery.

Hammond directed medical officers in the field to collect "specimens of morbid anatomy ... together with projectiles and foreign bodies removed" and to forward them to the newly founded museum for study. The Army Medical Museum's first curator, John Brinton, visited mid-Atlantic battlefields and solicited contributions from doctors throughout the Union Army.

During and after the war, AMM staff photographed wounded soldiers showing effects of gunshot wounds as well as results of amputations and other surgical procedures.

English statistician and epidemiologist William Farr uses the third Scheutz difference engine in the calculation of his English Life Table—the first instance of a printing calculator used extensively to do original work.

However, the machine was very troublesome, and the tables were completed by human computers. (See Reading 4.2)

At the end of the American Civil War, The Library of the Surgeon General's Office, along with the new Surgeon General's office, is, perhaps with some irony, moved to Ford's Theater, site of the tragic assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865.

The theater had been closed and remodelled in the intervening two years. The new Office/Library site was taken over by the U.S. Army to house important post-Civil War medical activities of the Surgeon General's Office. These included the archive of Civil War medical records (essential for verification of veterans' pension claims) and the Army Medical Museum. The archive of case records, pathological specimens and photographs gathered by the Army Medical Museum was compiled by Joseph J. Woodward, Charles Smart, George A. Otis, and David Huntington under the direction of then Surgeon General of the Army, Joseph K. Barnes, into the six massive volumes of The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, which were published between 1870 and 1888. This encyclopedic work has been called the "first comprehensive American medical book."

Under the direction of John Shaw Billings, the Library of the Surgeon General's Office (to be redesignated in 1956 the National Library of Medicine) begins publication of the Index Medicus -- an effort to index all of medical periodical literature.

Index Medicus finally ceased publication in print in 2004.

John Shaw Billings begins publication of the The Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office.

This became a landmark in the history of efforts to organize information and to make it searchable, and a primary general reference for the history of medicine and science. The fifith and final series was issued in 1961. The finished set of printed books contained "over 4.5 million. . . references to over 3.7 million bibliographic items.  2.5 million items are primarily journal articles; 250,000 items are monographs (books, pamphlets, and reports); approximately 300,000 items are dissertations (theses); and 16,000 are journal titles. Series 1 and Series 2 include portraits as separate citations but Series 3, 4, and 5 indicate portraits in descriptive notes for monographs and dissertations."

At the U.S. Census Bureau John Shaw Billings, founder and librarian of the Surgeons General's Library (now the National Library of Medicine), suggests to Herman Hollerith that there ought to be a machine for doing the purely mechanical work of tabulating population and similar statistics. 

Hollerith credited Billings for inspiring him to develop electric punched card tabulating for the census of 1890.

Austrian physician Sigmund Freud publishes "Ueber Coca," Centralblatt für die gesamte Therapie 2 (1884) 289-314.

This essay provided the best comprehensive review of the subject that had yet appeared, describing the early history of the coca plant and its use by South American native populations, the first European accounts of the plant in the sixteenth century, and the isolation of the alkaloid cocaine in 1859. Freud also presented his observations (with himself as subject) on the effects of the drug, describing its abolition of hunger and fatigue, the exhilaration and lasting euphoria it produced, and its supposed non-addictiveness— a misapprehension he would later bitterly regret, as misuse of the drug contributed to the death of his dear friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow.

Freud recognized cocain's anesthetic qualities and suggested its use as a topical or local anesthetic; unfortunately, Leopold Königstein, the colleague to whom he suggested its trial, procrastinated, and the crucial experiments were performed by Carl Koller, who subsequently achieved worldwide recognition as the discoverer of local anesthesia. Freud's suggestion that the drug might act by abolishing the effect of agencies that depress bodily feeling has since been confirmed.

Freud published a revised separate edition of Über coca in 1885.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) nos. F7 and F8.

Austrian physicians Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud publish Studien über Hysterie.

This work, which provided the first detailed account of the free-association method, is customarily regarded as the starting-point of psychoanalysis.  Joseph Breuer had discovered the "cathartic" method of curing hysteria in the early 1880s while treating the patient who would later be immortalized as "Anna O."; this patient, who exhibited a myriad of severe hysterical symptoms, found that the symptoms would disappear when she told Breuer the details of their onset. (Freud's biographer, the pioneering psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, gives "Anna O.," whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim, a large share of the credit for inventing what she called the "talking cure.")

Freud learned of this interesting case from Breuer shortly after its termination in June 1882. The case made a strong impression on him, and a few years later he began using a combination of hypnosis and the cathartic method in his own neurological practice. From this Freud gradually developed the method of free association, in which the patient was encouraged to say whatever came into his/her mind however "nonsensical" or "irrelevant," since Freud believed that the patient's statements provided clues about the network of associations already established in the mind, and would thus lead the therapist to the source of the patient's neurosis. "It was through devising the new method that Freud was enabled to penetrate into the previously unknown realm of the unconscious proper and to make the profound discoveries with which his name is imperishably associated" (Jones, Sigmund Freud I, 265).  

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) F26.

Because Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had his lab notes burned after his death there are conflicting accounts of the discovery, but this is a likely reconstruction: while investigating cathode rays with a fluorescent screen painted with barium platinocyanide and a Crookes tube, which he had wrapped in black cardboard so the visible light from the tube wouldn't interfere, the physics professor noticed a faint green glow from the screen, about one meter away. The invisible rays coming from the tube to make the screen glow were passing through the cardboard. He found they could also pass through books and papers on his desk.

Upon investigation Röntgen found that the fluorescence was caused by unknown rays, originating from the spot where cathode rays hit the glass wall of the vacuum tube. These unknown rays he temporarily designated X-rays.

Röntgen discovered the medical use of X-rays when he saw a picture of his wife's hand on a photographic plate formed due to X-rays on December 22, 1895. This inadvertent photograph of his wife's hand was the first X-ray photograph of a part of the human body.

In his initial report on the discovery Röntgen described the rays' photographic properties and their amazing ability to penetrate all substances, even living flesh. Although he was unable to determine the true physical nature of the rays, Röntgen was certain that he had discovered something entirely new.  He published his initial report, "Eine neue Art von Strahlen," in the relatively obscure Sitzungs-Bericht der physiikalisch-medicinischen Gesellschaft zu Würburg at the end of December 1895. The advantage of publishing in this obscure journal was that Röntgen obtained extremely rapid publication. The publishers of the journal issued offprints of the paper for commercial sale. These offprints went through several printings, reflecting unusually wide interest in the discovery from the international scientific and medical community. X-rays were among the most rapidly adopted and exploited scientific discoveries. Within a year roughly 1000 publications appeared on the subject.

For this discovery Röntgen received the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1841.

Austrian physician and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud issues Die Traumdeutung through the publisher Franz Deuticke in Leipzig and Vienna. This work on The Interpretation of Dreams has been called the last great original work in science or medicine to appear first as a monograph rather than as an article or series of articles published in scientific or medical journals.

The volume is dated 1900 on the title page but Freud's presentation copy to his close friend Wilhelm Fleiss bears the date 24 October 1899 on the title page. "In a letter to Fliess dated 27 October 1899 Freud thanked Fliess for his 'kind words in response to my sending you the dream book,' and noted that 'it has not yet been issued; only our two copies have so far seen the light of day.'

Jones, Sigmund Freud I, 395 states that the book 'actually published on November 4, 1899, but the publisher chose to put the date 1900 on the title page' " (Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine [1991] no. F33).

Chemist, historian of chemistry, and bibliographer John Ferguson publishes Bibliotheca Chemica. A Catalogue of the Alchemical, Chemical, and Pharmaceutical Books in the Collection of the Late James Young of Kelly and Duris.  The work was finely printed on handmade paper in an edition of unknown size, in full buckram or quarter morocco bindings, and presented "With the Compliments of the Trustees and Family of the Late Dr. James Young of Kelly."

One of the earliest technical chemists, Young's discovery of the distillation of paraffin from coal and oil-shales made him the founder of the Scottish shale oil industry. In about 1850 Young set out to collect the classic original works in the history of alchemy, chemistry, and pharmacy, eventually aided in this pursuit by Ferguson. Along with Augustus de Morgan and Latimer Clark, whose libraries are also noticed in this database, Young was one of the earliest collectors of the history of science.

The Young collection numbered about 1400 separate items, many of which were already of the greatest rarity by the end of the nineteenth century. Ferguson's 2-volume catalogue of more than a thousand densely printed quarto pages, with bibliographical details of each work, biographical notices of each writer, and exhaustive lists of references in chronological order, set a new standard in scope and accuracy for the descriptive bibliography of the history of science. Sir William Osler considered Ferguson's catalogue the model of descriptive scientific bibliography, writing in his inimitable style:

"though an absorbing and profitable study, the results of bibliography are too often recorded in tomes of intolerable dullness. The merit that appeals to me [in Ferguson's Bibliotheca Chemica] is the combination of biography with bibliography. Beside the book is a picture of the man sketched by a sympathetic hand "

The Young collection is preserved in the Andersonian Library, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Edward Tyson Reichert and Amos Peaslee Brown  publish The Differentiation and Specificity of Corresponding Proteins and other Vital Substances in Relation to Biological Classification and Organic Evolution: The Crystallography of Hemoglobins. 

This massive work with 100 plates including 600 images, was the first large-scale investigation of species differences at the molecular level.

“In 1909 appeared an extraordinary volume, The Crystallography of Hemoglobins, by Edward Tyson Reichert, a physiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Amos Peaslee Brown, a mineralogist there. Reichert had conceived the ambition to plot the evolutionary relationships among species by the divergences among their protein molecules. His essential idea was merely seventy years ahead of the technology: only with the advent of Frederick Sanger’s methods for sequencing amino acids could students of evolution begin to measure the similarities among proteins, and only with Sanger’s means of sequencing nucleotides in DNA, beginning in 1976, could such measurements of genetic similarity begin to be accurate. But Reichert understood the enormous scope for diversity if proteins were large, specific molecules; he settled on crystal forms—and recruited his colleague Brown—as the means to get at degrees of difference, and on hemoglobin as the easily crystallized protein universal among animals. Their book surveyed the nineteenth-century literature of hemoglobin; catalogued crystals of the stuff from a hundred and nine different vertebrate species—Philadelphia had a good zoo—complete with drawings and measurements of the crystal forms; and ended with six hundred large, clear, well-printed photomicrographs of hemoglobin crystals” (Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation, p. 492).

“Physiologist Edward Reichert of the Carnegie Institution of Washington proposed in 1909 that if a definite relationship between differences in proteins and physiological differences between species could be demonstrated, then ‘a fundamental principle of the utmost importance would be established in the explanation of heredity, mutation, the influence of food and environment, the differentiation of sex, and other great problems of biology, normal and pathological.’ Reichert, together with Amos Brown, examined hemoglobin crystals from about two hundred mammalian species, establishing a taxonomy of hemoglobins that paralleled traditional organismic classification. Mammalian visible attributes were thus replaced by the properties hidden in their molecular structures. Specificity therefore served as a probe into evolutionary change . . .” (Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life, pp. 43-44). 

In 1916 the distinguished London antiquarian booksellers Maggs Bros bought the penis of Napoleon Bonaparte from the descendants of Abbé Ange Paul Vignali, who had given the last rites to Napoleon on St. Helena. Vignali brought the penis along with a collection of more conventional mementos of Napoleon to Corsica, and died in a vendetta in 1828. He passed on the mementos to his sister, who at her death passed them on to her son, Charles-Marie Gianettini. After holding the Vignali collection of Napoleon memorabilia for eight years, Maggs sold it to the legendary American antiquarian bookseller Dr. A.S.W Rosenbach for £400 (then $2000) in 1924. 

Though the authenticity of the other Napoleon memorabilia in the Vignali collection was never in doubt, authenticity of the penis, which resembled something "like a maltreated strip of buckskin shoe-lace or shriveled eel," "rested mainly on a memoir by the valet, Ali (Saint-Denis), published in 1852 in the celebrated Revue des [Deux] Mondes. Ali claimed that he and Vignali had removed certain unnamed portions of Napoleon's corpse during the autopsy" (Charles Hamilton, Auction Madness [1980] 54-55).

With his characteristic flair Dr. Rosenbach received considerable publicity for this purchase.  According to the May 12, 1924 issue of Time Magazine:

"The collection numbers about 40 pieces, half of which consist of documents. The most interesting are: death mask from the matrix moulded by Dr. Antomarchi, Napoleon's doctor; a letter from Antomarchi to Vignali; the last cup ever used by the ex-French Emperor, a silver goblet inscribed with the Imperial arms; a silver knife, fork and spoon also engraved with the Imperial arms; a shirt, handkerchiefs, pair of white breeches, white pique waistcoats; Church vestments from the Longwood Chapel, some marked with the Imperial cypher; last, the most gruesome relic, a mummified tendon taken from the ex-Emperor's body during the postmortem" (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,718332,00.html, accessed 08-02-2009).

Dr. Rosenbach had the penis "enshrined" in an elaborate blue morocco and velvet box. In 1927 he exhibited it, along with the other Vignali relics, in the Museum of French Art in New York.

Though I had heard of this most unusual purchase in Dr. Rosenbach's career I was not aware that The Rosenbach Company had issued a catalogue  describing the collection until a copy of Description of the Vignali Collection of the Relics of Napoleon (1924) was offered early in 2010. This I acquired, and we mounted a scan of the 20 page catalogue in the Traditions section of our website.

In that catalogue the description of item number 9 reads as follows:

"A mummifled tendon taken from Napoleon's body during the post  mortem. (The authenticity of this remarkable relic has lately [in 1852!] been confirmed by the publication in the Revue des Deux Mondes of a posthumous memoir by St. Denis, in which he expressly states that he and Vignali took away small pieces of Napoleon's corpse during the autopsy.)"

As historic as the Vignali collection was, it was not readily salable. According to the standard biography, Rosenbach by Edwin Wolf II and John F. Fleming (1960), a work which was inspirational in my early career, the Vignali collection remained in the inventory of The Rosenbach Company for 23 years until it was finally purchased by collector Donald Hyde in 1947.

But wait, the story continues:

According to Charles Hamilton, when Donald Hyde died in 1966 his widow, Mary, also a serious collector, turned the Vignali collection over to Dr. Rosenbach's successor, John Fleming. Fleming in turn sold it to dealer Bruce Gimelson for $35,000. Finding the collection difficult to resell, as had Maggs and Rosenbach, Gimelson consigned it to Christie's in London for sale en bloc at a reserve price equal to his cost, but with no success. When the collection failed to sell London tabloids ran the naughty headline, "Not Tonight, Josephine!"

Eight years later Gimelson consigned the collection in Paris at Drouot Rive Gauche. This time the collection was dispersed, and the penis was purchased by John K. Lattimer, professor emeritus and former chairman of urology at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, for the equivalent of $3000. The object fit in well with other historical objects in Lattimer's collection:

"Dr. John Lattimer possessed Abraham Lincoln's bloodstained collar and a treasure trove of items from his own idiosyncratic relationships to some of the most important historical events of the 20th century. He was an attending urologist to Nazi prisoners at the Nuremberg trials and had acquired Herman Goering's suicide vial. He worked on the autopsy of John F. Kennedy and possessed upholstery from the president's limousine in Dallas" ("The Twisted Story of Napoleon's Privates" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92126411, accessed 05-23-2010).

Austrian mathematician Johann Radon demonstrates that the image of a three-dimensional object can be constructed from an infinite number of two-dimensional images of the object.

About sixty-five years later Radon's work was applied in the invention of computed tomography.

London antiquarian booksellers Maggs Bros. issue Catalogue of Medical Works from the Library of Dr. Nicholaus Pol, Born c1470; Court Physician to the Emperor Maximilian I. Maggs further characterized the 34 items offered in the catalogue as "A remarkable collection of 'Editiones principes' and other early editions of Medical Authors, Classical, Arabian, and medieval from famous early presses of France and Italy in the original Gothic Bindings executed for Dr. Pol".

The asking price for the collection—£2500, even when the pound equalled nearly $5— seems exceptionally reasonable today, considering the optimal significance and quality of the books involved.

The catalogue was bought in its entirely by the Cleveland Medical Library and it is preserved in the Howard Dittrick Medical History Center at Case Western Reserve University.

"Through a clerical error, Dr. Harvey Cushing did not receive a copy of the catalogue, but his nephew Dr. Edward H. Cushing of Cleveland did. He promptly persuaded President Vinson of Western Reserve University to cable for the collection and hold it until the Cleveland Medical Library Association could raise the money. This was soon supplied by a donor who asked to be nameless, and the collection came to rest in the Cleveland Medical Library as a memorial to Mr. Charles H. Bingham" (http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/dittrick/site2/books/pol.html, accessed 08--02-2009).

During World War II Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller of Geigy Pharmaceutical discovers the high efficiency of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) as a contact poison against several athropods.

During World War II DDT was used with great effect among both military and civilian populations to control mosquitoes spreading malaria and lice transmitting typhus, resulting in dramatic reductions in the incidence of both diseases.

In 1948 Müller received the Nobel Prize in Biology and Medicine for this discovery, which is thought to have saved the lives of over 21,000,000 people worldwide. After the war, DDT was made available for use as an agricultural insecticide, and its production and use skyrocketed with unexpected disastrous effects upon the environment. 

As a result of the 1962 book, Silent Spring, by American marine biologist and nature writer, Rachel Carson, noticed in this database, the disastrous consequences of DDT began to be understood by politicians and the public, and DDT was eventually banned in the United States in 1972.

At the second English computer conference held in Manchester, computer programmer J. M. Bennett and biochemist and crystallographer John Kendrew describe their use of the Cambridge EDSAC for the computation of Fourier syntheses in the calculation of structure factors of the protein molecule myoglobin.

This was the first application of an electronic computer to computational biology or structural biology. The first published account of this research appeared in the very scarce Manchester University Computer Conference Proceedings (1951). (See Reading 10.3.)

Kendrew and Bennett formally published an extended version of their paper as "The Computation of Fourier Syntheses with a Digital Electric Calculating Machine," Acta Crystallographica 5 (1952) 109-116. Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) nos. 744 & 745.

In 1962 Kendrew received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of the 3-dimensional molecular structure of myoglobin, the first protein molecule to be "solved."

William H. Sweet and Gordon L. Brownell at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, describe the first positron imaging device. and and the first attempt to record three dimensional data in positron detection in their paper entitled "Localization of brain tumors with positron emitters',' Nucleonics XI (1953) 40-45. This was the beginning of positron emission tomography (PET).

"Despite the relatively crude nature of this imaging instrument, the brain images were markedly better than those obtained by other imaging devices. It also contained several features that were incorporated into future positron imaging devices. Data were obtained by translation of two opposed detectors using coincidence detection with mechanical motion in two dimensions and a printing mechanism to form a two-dimensional image of the positron source. This was our first attempt to record three-dimensional data in positron detection" (Brownell, A History of Positron Imaging [1999], accessed 12-25-2008)

James D. Watson and Francis Crick discover the self-complimentary double-helical structure of the DNA molecule. In their paper, “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids. A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” Nature 171 (1953) 737-38, they state that, “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”

James D. Watson and Francis Crick publish “Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid, ” Nature 171 (1953) 964-7.

In this paper Watson and Crick proposed DNA’s means of replication. This discovery has been called as significant, or possibly even more significant, than their discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA published in April 1953.

Inge Edler and Carl Hellmuth Hertz at Lund University in Sweden obtain the first recording of the ultrasound echo from the heart. This is the beginning of echocardiography from which diagnostic sonography, or medical ultrasonography, will evolve.

"The principle for echocardiography is as follows. The vibrations in a piezoelectric crystal create a beam of high frequency sound waves that are transmitted into the chest. When the waves pass an interface, such as between the heart wall and the surrounding area or the surface of a cardiac valve, some of the sound is reflected, creating an echo. The crystal is reset, enabling it to receive the echo. The longer it took for the echo to return to the crystal, the longer the distance between the crystal and the surface that was the source of the echo. The principle was the same as for sonar, used to measure the depth of water under a vessel, only in this case you measure the distance from the structure that is the source of the echo to the chest wall."

Edler, Inge & Hertz, Carl Hellmuth. The Use of the Ultrasonic Reflectoscope for Continuous Recording of the Movements of Heart Walls. K. Fysiogr. Sellsk. Lund. Foresch., 24 (1954) 1-19.

George Gamow comes up with the idea of a genetic code in his paper “Possible Mathematical Relation between Deoxyribonucleic Acids and Proteins” (Det. Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab: Biologiske Meddeleiser 22, no. 3 [1954]: 1-13).

In the fall of 1953 Gamov gave Crick an earlier draft of this paper entitled “Protein synthesis by DNA molecules.”

“Gamov’s scheme was decisive, Crick has often said since, because it forced him, and soon others, to begin to think hard and from a particular slant--that of the coding problem—about the next stage now that the structure of DNA was known.” (Judson, Eighth Day of Creation).

Probably the first widely used controlled vocabulary for searching information was the Subject Heading Authority List issued by the National Library of Medicine.

"The first official list of subject headings published by the National Library of Medicine appeared in 1954 under the title Subject Heading Authority List. It was based on the internal authority list that had been used for publication of Current List of Medical Literature which in turn had incorporated headings from the Library's Index-Catalogue and from the 1940 Quarterly Cumulative Index Medicus Subject Headings. With the inception of Index Medicus in 1960, a new and thoroughly revised Medical Subject Headings appeared.

"With the 1954 Subject Heading Authority List, there appeared a 'Categorical Listing' of standard subheadings. 'Abnormalities,' for instance, was listed as a standard subheading for use with terms for organs, tissues, and regions, and 'anesthesia and analgesia' was to be used under surgical procedure headings. But such subheadings could be used only for subject headings which fell within the category of headings to which they were to be applied. There were over 100 such subheadings, some of which varied only slightly according to the category of main heading with which they were used. For instance, 'therapeutic use' was used under physical agents and drugs and chemicals, and 'therapy' was used with diseases. In the 1960 Medical Subject Headings, the number of subheadings was reduced to sixty-seven. They could be used under any kind of main heading if the combination was not patently foolish or impossible. These sixty-seven subheadings were applied with more generalized meanings. For instance, the subheading "therapy" was used to mean 'therapy of,' 'therapeutic use of' or just 'therapeutic aspects.' Though this solution was simpler, many problems still remained. The use of one subheading might prevent the use of another. For instance, if a paper covered the etiology, pathology, and therapy of a disease, it might occur without further subdivision, or it might occur under the subheading which seemed most appropriate to the indexer. If 'therapy' was chosen, the article would be lost to the searcher looking for the etiology of the disease under the subheading 'etiology.' In addition, if the subheading 'diseases' had been appended to the term for an anatomic part, it would not be possible to subdivide further for the therapy or complications of such diseases. A related problem was the overlap in meaning of the subheadings themselves. It was difficult, for example, to decide whether a paper on chemical biosynthesis fit best under 'chemistry' or 'metabolism.'

"Categorized lists of terms were printed for the first time in the 1963 Medical Subject Headings and contained thirteen main categories and a total of fifty-eight separate groups in subcategories and main categories. These categorized lists made it possible for the user to find many more related terms than were in the former cross-reference structure. In 1963, the second edition of Medical Subject Headings contained 5,700 descriptors, compared with 4,400 in the 1960 edition. Of the headings used in the 1960 list, 113 were withdrawn in favor of newer terms. In contrast, the 2009 edition of MeSH contains 25,186 descriptors.

"In 1960, medical librarianship was on the cusp of a revolution. The first issue of the new Index Medicus series was published. On the horizon was a computerization project undertaken by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to store and retrieve information. The Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) would speed the publication process for bibliographies such as Index Medicus, facilitate the expansion of coverage of the literature, and permit searches for individuals upon demand. The new list of subject headings introduced in 1960 was the underpinning of the analysis and retrieval operation. MeSH was a new and thoroughly revised version of lists of subject headings compiled by NLM for its bibliographies and cataloging. Frank B. Rogers, then NLM director, announced several innovations as he introduced MeSH in 1960" (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/2009/introduction/intro_preface.html#pref_hist. accessed 05-04-2009).

Frederick Sanger sequences the amino acids of insulin, the first of any protein.

Sanger's work “revealed that a protein has a definite constant, genetically determined sequence--and yet a sequence with no general rule for its assembly. Therefore it had to have a code” (Judson, Eighth Day of Creation, 188).

Sanger received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1958.

Shigeo Satomura demonstrates the application of the Doppler shift in the frequency of ultrasound backscattered by moving cardiac structures.

This was the beginning of doppler ultrasound for evaluating blood flow and pressure by bouncing high-frequency sound waves (ultrasound) off red blood cells.

S. Satomura, Ultrasonic Doppler Method for the Inspection of Cardiac Functions. J. Accoust. Soc. Amer. 29 (1957) 1181-85.

Molecular Biologist Francis Crick delivers his paper “On Protein Synthesis,” published in Symp. Soc. Exp. Biol. 12 (1958): 138-63.

In it Crick proposed two general principles:

1) The Sequence Hypothesis:

“The order of bases in a portion of DNA represents a code for the amino acid sequence of a specific protein. Each ‘word’ in the code would name a specific amino acid. From the two-dimensional genetic text, written in DNA, are forged the whole diversity of uniquely shaped three-dimensional proteins

"In this context, Crick discussed the 'coding problem'—how the ordered sequence of the four bases in DNA might constitute genes that encode and disburse information directing the manufacture of proteins. Crick hypothesized that, with four bases to DNA and twenty amino acids, the simplest code would involve "triplets"—in which sequences of three bases coded for a single amino acid" (Genome News Network, Genetics and Genomics Timeline 1957).

2) The Central Dogma:

“Information is transmitted from DNA and RNA to proteins but information cannot be transmitted from a protein to DNA.” This paper “permanently altered the logic of biology.” (Judson)

Ian Donald, Regius Professor of Midwifery at the University of Glasgow, and his colleagues John MacVicar, an obstetrician, and Tom Brown, an engineer, publish a paper in The Lancet entitled "Investigation of Abdominal Masses by Pulsed Ultrasound." This article describes their experience using an ultrasound scanner on 100 patients, and includes 12 illustrations of various gynecologic disorders (eg, ovarian cysts, fibroids) as well as demonstration of obstetric findings such as the fetal skull at 34 weeks' gestation, "hydramnios" (polyhydramnios), and twins in breech presentation. The somewhat grainy and indistinct "Compound B-mode contact scanner" images are the first published obstetrical or gynecological sonograms.

J. M. Norman (ed),  Morton's Medical Bibliography 5th ed.(1991) no. 2682.

Robert S. Ledley and Lee B. Lusted publish "Reasoning Foundations of Medical Diagnosis," Science, 130, no. 3366, 9-21.

This was highly influential in the development of clinical decision support systems (CDSS) — interactive computer programs,  or expert systems, designed to assist physicians and other health professionals with decision making tasks.

Drs. William Chardack and Andrew Gage, and electrical engineer Wilson Greatbatch, report the success of the world’s first successful long-term implant in a human patient of a self-contained, internally powered artificial pacemaker in their paper entitled A Transistorized, Self-contained, Implantable Pacemaker for the Long-term Correction of Complete Heart Block.

Allen M. Cormack shows that changes in tissue density can be computed from x-ray data.

No machine was constructed at this time because of limitations in computing power. This discovery led in 1972 to the invention of computed tomography (CT).

Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) operational at the National Library of Medicine.

It was the first large scale, computer-based, retrospective search service available to the general public.

Godfrey Hounsfield invents computed tomography (CT), the first application of computers to medical imaging.

Medline (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online), a literature database of life sciences and biomedical information, is operational at the National Library of Medicine. It was initially a database production of the printed Index Medicus.

By 2008 Medline  ontained "more than 18 million" records from approximately 5,000 selected publications covering biomedicine and health from 1950 to the present.

Raymond V. Damadian files a patent for "An Apparatus and Method for Detecting Cancer in Tissue."

Damadian's patent 3,789,832 was granted on February 5, 1974. This was the first patent filed on the use of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance for scanning the human body, but it did not not describe a method for generating pictures from such a scan or precisely how such a scan might be achieved.

Stanley Cohen, Annie Chang, Robert Helling, and Herbert Boyer demonstrate that if DNA is fragmented with restriction endonucleases and combined with similarly restricted plasmid DNA, the resulting recombinant DNA molecules are biologically active and can replicate in host bacterial cells. Plasmids can thus act as vectors for the propagation of foreign cloned genes.

This was the first practical method of cloning a gene, and a breakthrough in the development of recombinant DNA technologies and genetic engineering.

Cohen, Chang, Boyer and Helling, “Construction of Biologically Functional Bacterial Plasmids in Vitro,” Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 70 (1973): 3240-3244

Paul Lauterbur develops a way to generate the first Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI), in 2D and 3D, using gradients.

Lauterbur described an imaging technique that removed the usual resolution limits due to the wavelength of the imaging field. He used "two fields: one interacting with the object under investigation, the other restricting this interaction to a small region. Rotation of the fields relative to the object produces a series of one-dimensional projections of the interacting regions, from which two- or three-dimensional images of their spatial distribution can be reconstructed" (http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/lauterbur/index.html, accessed 11-23-2008).

This was the beginning of magnetic reasonance imaging.

Lauterbur, Image Formation by Induced Local Interactions: Examples Employing Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Nature 242 (1973), 190–191.

Lauterbur's Nobel Lecture is available from the Nobel website. You can also watch a 65 minute video of Lauterbur delivering the lecture from this link.

Robert S. Ledley at Georgetown University develops the ACTA (Automatic Computerized Traverse Axial)— the first whole-body computerized tomography scanner. 

"This machine had 30 photomultiplier tubes as detectors and completed a scan in only 9 translate/rotate cycles, much faster than the EMI-scanner. It used a DEC PDP11/34 minicomputer both to operate the servo-mechanisms and to acquire and process the images. The Pfizer drug company acquired the prototype from the university, along with rights to manufacture it. Pfizer then began making copies of the prototype, calling it the "200FS" (FS meaning Fast Scan), which were selling as fast as they could make them. This unit produced images in a 256x256 matrix, with much better definition than the EMI-Scanner's 80" (Wikipedia article on Computed Tomography, accessed 04-15-2009).

Ledley RS, Di Chiro G, Luessenhop AJ, Twigg HL. "Computerized transaxial x-ray tomography of the human body," Science 186, No. 4160 (1974) 207-212.

The first of the three Cohen-Boyer recombinant DNA cloning patents is granted, leading to the foundation of the biotechnology industry.

The Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA Molecules, organized by Paul Berg, Maxine Singer, and Richard Roblin occurs in Asilomar, California.

"In addition to an international group of 150 scientists, the participants included lawyers (including Daniel Singer, Maxine Singer's husband) to help consider legal and ethical issues, and 16 journalists to cover the four-day event. A primary aim of the group was to consider whether to lift the voluntary moratorium [on recombinant DNA (rDNA) research] and if so, under what conditions research could proceed safely. The participants concluded (though not unanimously) that rDNA research should proceed but under strict guidelines. Their recommendations went to a National Institutes of Health committee chaired by NIH director Donald Fredrickson and charged with formulating those guidelines, which were issued in July 1976" (http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/CD/Views/Exhibit/narrative/dna.html, accessed 07-25-2009).

Venture capitalist Robert A. Swanson and biochemist Herbert W. Boyer found the first genetic engineering company, Genentech, to use recombinant DNA methods to make medically important drugs.

Walter Gilbert and Allan M. Maxam devise a technique for sequencing DNA.

“The Gilbert-Maxam method involved multiplying, dividing, and carefully fragmenting DNA. A stretch of DNA would be multiplied a millionfold in bacteria. Each strand was radioactively labeled at one end. Nested into four groups, chemical reagents were applied to selectively cleave the DNA strand along its bases--adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T). Carefully dosed, the reagents would break the DNA into a large number of smaller fragments of varying length. In gel electrophoresis, as a function of DNA’s negative charge, the strands would separate according to length, revealing, via the terminal points of breakage, the position of each base.”

Frederick Sanger and colleagues independently develop the methods for the rapid sequencing of long sections of DNA molecules. Sanger’s method, and that developed by Gilbert and Maxam, made it possible to read the nucleotide sequence for entire genes that run from 1000 to 30,000 bases long.

Sanger, F., Nicklen, S., and Coulson, A.R. "DNA Sequencing with Chain-Terminating Inhibitors," Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. (USA) 74 (1977) 546-67.

Physicist Peter Mansfield develops a mathematical technique that will allow NMR scans to take seconds rather than hours and produce clearer images than Lauterbur.

Mansfield showed how gradients in the magnetic field could be mathematically analysed, which made it possible to develop a useful nuclear magnetic resonance imaging technique. Mansfield also showed how extremely fast imaging could be achievable. This became technically possible a decade later.

P Mansfield and A A Maudsley, Medical imaging by NMR, Brit. J. Radiol. 50 (1977) 188.
P Mansfield, Multi-planar imaging formation using NMR spin echoes J. Physics C. Solid State Phys. 10 (1977) L55–L58.

References from Mansfield's Nobel Lecture. You can also watch a 64 minute video of Mansfield delivering his lecture at this link.

Frederick Sanger and colleagues sequence the entire genome of bacteriophage lambda using a random shotgun technique.

This was the first whole genome shotgun (WGS) sequence.

Sanger, “Nucleotide Sequence of Bacteriophage Lambda,” J. Mol. Biol. 162 (1982) 729-73.

In 1985, as Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Health and Environmental Research Programs, Charles DeLisi and his advisors proposed, planned and defended before the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Congress, the Human Genome Project. The proposal created a storm of controversy, but was included in President Ronald Reagan’s Fiscal Year 1987 budget submission to the Congress, and subsequently passed both the House and the Senate.

The beginning of the project may have occurred in a workshop known as the Alta Summit held in December 1984.

"Robert Sinsheimer, then Chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), thought about sequencing the human genome as the core of a fund-raising opportunity in late 1984. He and others convened a group of eminent scientists to discuss the idea in May 1985. This workshop planted the idea, although it did not succeed in attracting money for a genome research institute on the campus of UCSC. Without knowing about the Santa Cruz workshop, Renato Dulbecco of the Salk Institute conceived of sequencing the genome as a tool to understand the genetic origins of cancer. Dulbecco, a Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist, laid out his ideas on Columbus Day, 1985, and subsequently in other public lectures and in a commentary for Science. The commentary, published in March 1986, was the first widely public exposure of the idea and gave impetus to the idea's third independent origin, by then already gathering steam.

"Charles DeLisi, who did not initially know about either the Santa Cruz workshop or Dulbecco's public lectures, conceived of a concerted effort to sequence the human genome under the aegis of the Department of Energy (DOE). DeLisi had worked on mathematical biology at the National Cancer Institute, the largest component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). How to interpret DNA sequences was one of the problems he had studied, working with the T-10 group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico (a group of mathematicians and others interested in applying mathematics and computational techniques to biological questions). In 1985, DeLisi took the reins of DOE's Office of Health and Environmental Research, the program that supported most biology in the Department. The origins of DOE's biology program traced to the Manhattan Project, the World War II program that produced the first atomic bombs with its concern about how radiation caused genetic damage.

"In the fall of 1985, DeLisi was reading a draft government report on technologies to detect inherited mutations, a nagging problem in the study of children to those exposed to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, when he came up with the idea of a concerted program to sequence the human genome.9 DeLisi was positioned to translate his idea into money and staff. While his was the third public airing of the idea, it was DeLisi's conception and his station in government science administration that launched the genome project" (Robert Mullan Cook-Deegan, Origins of the Human Genome Project, accessed 05-24-2009).

In March 1986 the Department of Energy, Office of Health and Environmental Research, sponsored a workshop at Los Alamos. This was edited by M. Bitensky and published as Sequencing the Human Genome. Summary Report of the  Santa Fe Workshop, March 3-4, 1986. 

The initial report on the Human Genome Project appeared in April 1987 as:

Report on the Human Genome Initiative for the Office of Health and Environmental Research, Prepared by the Subcommittee on Human Genome of the Health and Environmental Research Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Research Office of Health and Environmental Research.

Leroy Hood and Lloyd Smith from the California Institute of Technology develop the first semi-automatic DNA sequencer working with a laser that recognizes fluorescing DNA markers.

"A biologist at the California Institute of Technology and a founder of API [Applied Biosystems, Inc.], Hood improved the existing Sanger method of enzymatic sequencing, which was becoming the laboratory standard. In this method, DNA to be sequenced is cut apart, and a single strand serves as a template for the synthesis of complementary strands. The nucleotides used to build these strands are randomly mixed with a radioactively labeled and modified nucleotide that terminates the synthesis. Fragments of all different lengths result. The resulting array, sent through a separation gel, reveals the order of the bases. Transferred to film, an "autoradiograph" provides a readable sequence from raw data. This data could be transferred to a computer by a human reader.

"In automating the process, Hood modified both the chemistry and the data-gathering processes. In the sequencing reaction itself, he sought to replace the use of radioactive labels, which were unstable, posed a health hazard, and required separate gels for each of the four DNA bases.

" • In place of radioisotopes, Hood developed chemistry that used fluorescent dyes of different colors—one for each of the four DNA bases. This system of "color-coding" eliminated the need to run several reactions in overlapping gels.

"The fluorescent labels were also aspects of the larger system that revolutionized the end stage of the process—the way in which sequence data was gathered. Hood integrated laser and computer technology, eliminating the tedious process of information-gathering by hand.

" • As the fragments of DNA percolated through the gel, a laser beam stimulated the fluorescent labels, causing them to glow. The light they emitted was picked up by a lens and photomultiplier, and transmitted as digital information directly into a computer" (Genome News Network, Genetics and Genomics Timeline 1989, accessed 05-25-2009).

Applied Biosystems markets the first commercial DNA sequencing machine, based on Leroy Hood’s technology.

Formal proposals are made by the Department of Energy in US to sequence the human genome.

It was estimated that one worker could produce about 50,0000 bases of finished DNA sequence per year at a cost of about $1-$2 per base. Based on these costs, the human genome would take 60,000 person-years and cost $36 billion to complete.

J. Craig Venter and colleagues describe a fast new approach to gene discovery using Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs).

Although controversial when first introduced, ESTs were soon widely employed both in public and private sector research. They proved economical and versatile, used not only for rapid identification of new genes, but also for analyzing gene expression, gene families, and possible disease-causing mutations.

J. Craig Venter leaves the National Institutes of Health and founds The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR).

Virtual Medical Worlds, "a monthly Virtual Magazine on Telemedicine and High Performance Computing and Networking for readers interested in computer applications in medical environments," initiates publication on the Internet.

J. Craig Venter founds Celera Genomics, with Applera Corporation (Applied Biosystems), to sequence and assemble the human genome.

"Celera Genomics announced the first complete assembly of the human genome. Using whole genome shotgun sequencing, Celera began sequencing in September 1999 and finished in December. Assembly of the 3.12 billion base pairs of DNA, over the next six months, required some 500 million trillion sequence comparisons, and represented the most extensive computation ever undertaken in biology.

“The Human Genome Project reported it had finished a “working draft” of the genome, stating that the project had fully sequenced 85 percent of the genome. Five major institutions in the United States and Great Britain performed the bulk of sequencing, together with contributions from institutes in China, France, and Germany” (Genome News Network, Genetics and Genomics Timeline 2000, accessed 05-24-2009).

"Seven months after the ceremony at the White House marking the completion of the human genome sequence, highlights from two draft sequences and analyses of the data were published in Science and Nature. Scientists at Celera Genomics and the publicly funded Human Genome Project independently found that humans have approximately 30,000 genes that carry within them the instructions for making the body's diverse collection of proteins.

"The findings cast new doubt on the old paradigm that one gene makes one protein. Rather, it appears that one gene can direct the synthesis of many proteins through mechanisms that include 'alternative splicing.' "It seems to be a matter of five or six proteins, on average, from one gene," said Victor A. McKusick of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who was a co-author of the Science paper.

"The finding that one gene makes many proteins suggests that biomedical research in the future will rely heavily on an integration of genomics and proteomics, the word coined to describe the study of proteins and their biological interactions. Proteins are markers of the early onset of disease, and are vital to prognosis and treatment; most drugs and other therapeutic agents target proteins. A detailed understanding of proteins and the genes from which they come is the next frontier.

"One of the questions raised by the sequencing of the human genome is this: Whose genome is it anyway? The answer turns out to be that it doesn't really matter. As scientists have long suspected, human beings are all very much alike when it comes to our genes. The paper in Science reported that the DNA of human beings is 99.9 percent alike—a powerful statement about the relatedness of all humankind" (Genome News Network, Genetics and Genomics Timeline 2001, accessed 05-24-2009)

References:

Venter, J.C. et al. "The sequence of the human genome," Science 291, 1304-1351 (February 16, 2001).

Lander, E.S. et al. The Genome International Sequencing Consortium. "Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome," Nature 409, 860-921 (February 15, 2001).

The Privacy Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) goes into effect.

"The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1996. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) website, Title I of HIPAA protects health insurance coverage for workers and their families when they change or lose their jobs. Title II of HIPAA, known as the Administrative Simplification (AS) provisions, requires the establishment of national standards for electronic health care transactions and national identifiers for providers, health insurance plans, and employers. It helps people keep their information private.

"The Administration Simplification provisions also address the security and privacy of health data. The standards are meant to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the nation's health care system by encouraging the widespread use of electronic data interchange in the U.S. health care system."

"The HIPAA Privacy Rule regulates the use and disclosure of certain information held by 'covered entities' (generally, health care clearinghouses, employer sponsored health plans, health insurers, and medical service providers that engage in certain transactions.)  It establishes regulations for the use and disclosure of Protected Health Information (PHI). PHI is any information held by a covered entity which concerns health status, provision of health care, or payment for health care that can be linked to an individual. This is interpreted rather broadly and includes any part of an individual's medical record or payment history.

"Covered entities must disclose PHI to the individual within 30 days upon request. They also must disclose PHI when required to do so by law, such as reporting suspected child abuse to state child welfare agencies.

"A covered entity may disclose PHI to facilitate treatment, payment, or health care operations, or if the covered entity has obtained authorization from the individual. However, when a covered entity discloses any PHI, it must make a reasonable effort to disclose only the minimum necessary information required to achieve its purpose.

"The Privacy Rule gives individuals the right to request that a covered entity correct any inaccurate PHI. It also requires covered entities to take reasonable steps to ensure the confidentiality of communications with individuals. . . .

"The Privacy Rule requires covered entities to notify individuals of uses of their PHI. Covered entities must also keep track of disclosures of PHI and document privacy policies and procedures. They must appoint a Privacy Official and a contact person responsible for receiving complaints and train all members of their workforce in procedures regarding PHI.

"An individual who believes that the Privacy Rule is not being upheld can file a complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR). However, according to the Wall Street Journal, the OCR has a long backlog and ignores most complaints. 'Complaints of privacy violations have been piling up at the Department of Health and Human Services. Between April 2003 and Nov. 30, the agency fielded 23,896 complaints related to medical-privacy rules, but it has not yet taken any enforcement actions against hospitals, doctors, insurers or anyone else for rule violations. A spokesman for the agency says it has closed three-quarters of the complaints, typically because it found no violation or after it provided informal guidance to the parties involved' " (Wikipedia article on Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, accessed 08-05-2009).

The Index-Catalogue of the Surgeon-General's Office, a 61 volume bibliographical resource for the history of medicine and science, which began publication in 1870 under the direction of John Shaw Billings, is made available online by the National Library of Medicine.

This was the culmination of a data conversion project which began in 1996.

Scientists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology decipher the genetic code of the 1918 avian flu virus H5N1, which killed as many as 50,000,000 people worldwide, from a victim exhumed in 1997 from the Alaskan permafrost. They reconstruct the virus in the laboratory and will publish the genetic sequence.

The Royal Society of London announces that The Royal Society Digital Journal Archive, dating back to 1665 and containing the full text and illustrations of more than 60,000 articles, is available online.

The genome of James D. Watson, co-discover of the double-helical structure of DNA, is sequenced and presented to Watson. It is the second individual human genome to be sequenced. The first was that of J. Craig Venter, which was sequenced in the human genome project completed in 2001.

England's Coventry University develops a MSc course in clinical management that holds problem based learning groups for students in Second Life. The course trains students in managing healthcare facilities, and is the first healthcare course to use Second Life as a learning platform.

Imperial College London Medical School develops Phase I - Game-based learning for Virtual Patients in Second Life.

"The four-dimensional framework described by De Freitas and Martin (2006), plus the learning types described by Helmer (2007), as well as the different aspects of emergent narrative described by Murray (1997) have provided the basis for the design of these game-based learning activities for virtual patients under two different categories: context and learner specification, and narrative and modes of representation. Phase I of this project focused on the delivery of a virtual patient in the area of Respiratory Medicine following a game-based learning model in Second Life."

You can watch the video of Phase 1 on YouTube at this link.

Timothy J. Ley and numerous collaborators from different countries publish in the journal Nature, DNA sequencing of a cytogenetically normal acute myeloid luekaemia genome.

This was first time that researchers decoded all the genes of a person with cancer and found a set of mutations that might have caused the disease or aided its progression. The New York Times online reported:

"Using cells donated by a woman in her 50s who died of leukemia, the scientists sequenced all the DNA from her cancer cells and compared it to the DNA from her own normal, healthy skin cells. Then they zeroed in on 10 mutations that occurred only in the cancer cells, apparently spurring abnormal growth, preventing the cells from suppressing that growth and enabling them to fight off chemotherapy.

"The findings will not help patients immediately, but researchers say they could lead to new therapies and would almost certainly help doctors make better choices among existing treatments, based on a more detailed genetic picture of each patient’s cancer. Though the research involved leukemia, the same techniques can also be used to study other cancers."

Google.org unveils Google Flu Trends, using aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems.

"Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?

"We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

"During the 2007-2008 flu season, an early version of Google Flu Trends was used to share results each week with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC. Across each of the nine surveillance regions of the United States, we were able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports" (Google Flu Trends website).

Bioengineer Stephen R. Quake of Stanford University invents a new technology for decoding DNA that can sequence a human genome at a cost of $50,000.

"Dr. Quake’s machine, the Heliscope Single Molecule Sequencer, can decode or sequence a human genome in four weeks with a staff of three people. The machine is made by a company he founded, Helicos Biosciences, and costs 'about $1 million, depending on how hard you bargain,' he said.

"Only seven human genomes have been fully sequenced. They are those of J. Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA decoding; James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix; two Koreans; a Chinese; a Yoruban; and a leukemia victim. Dr. Quake’s seems to be the eighth full genome, not counting the mosaic of individuals whose genomes were deciphered in the Human Genome Project."

"For many years DNA was sequenced by a method that was developed by Frederick Sanger in 1975 and used to sequence the first human genome in 2003, at a probable cost of at least $500 million. A handful of next-generation sequencing technologies are now being developed and constantly improved each year. Dr. Quake’s technology is a new entry in that horse race.

"Dr. Quake calculates that the most recently sequenced human genome cost $250,000 to decode, and that his machine brings the cost to less than a fifth of that.

“ 'There are four commercial technologies, nothing is static and all the platforms are improving by a factor of two each year,' he said. 'We are about to see the floodgates opened and many human genomes sequenced.'

"He said the much-discussed goal of the $1,000 genome could be attained in two or three years. That is the cost, experts have long predicted, at which genome sequencing could start to become a routine part of medical practice" (Nicholas Wade, NY Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/science, /11gene.html?8dpc).

At the CeBit exhibition in Hannover, Germany, Christoph Guger of Guger Technologies (g.tech) of Graz, Austria, offers intendiX, "the world's first personal BCI speller" for sale at the retail price of €9000.

"The world’s first patient-ready and commercially available brain computer interface just arrived at CeBIT 2010. The Intendix from Guger Technologies (g*tec) is a system that uses an EEG cap to measure brain activity in order to let you type with your thoughts. Meant to work with those with locked-in syndrome, or other disabilities, Intendix is simple enough to use after just 10 minutes of training. You simply focus on a grid of letters as they flash. When your desired letter lights up, brain activity spikes and Intendix types it. As users master the system, a few will be able to type as quickly as 1 letter a second. Besides typing, it can also trigger alarms, convert text to speech, print, copy, or email" (http://singularityhub.com/2010/03/07/intendix-the-brain-computer-interface-goes-commercial-video/, accessed 03-16-2010).

♦You can watch a video of intendiX in operation entitled Select words by thinking—world record on YouTube at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlUPFpZswJk, accessed 03-16-2010).