Medicine

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Pietro Longhi The apothecary’s workshop in a painting of Pietro Longhi, circa 1752 (from Wikimedia Commons)
Marsili studies medicine at a time when medical education encompasses the numerous aspects of the knowledge of the natural sciences and philosophical thought. Botany itself, to which Marsili will subsequently devote himself instead of undertaking the profession of doctor, is still studied mainly as a support to pharmacology and medical practice.

In the collection we find the works of the great classical authors such as Hippocrates and Galen, of modern physicians linked to a realist vision and to the experimental method, such as Vesalio and Harvey, and of the contemporaries Cocchi and Morgagni, author of the first true treatise on pathological anatomy ("De sedibus et causis morborum per anatomen indagatis", 1761).

Very refined illustrations can also be found in the medical books, as well as in those of botany or zoology, taking into account the methods of contemporary painting. These illustrations are generally realized with the technique of engraving on wood matrices (xylography).


PAGE INDEX

Bartolomaeus Anglicus, Liber de proprietatibus rerum... (1491)

An incunabulum (i.e. printed text published by the year 1500), printed in Strasbourg in 1491, probably by Georg Husner. It bears a similar appearance to a manuscript of the time, with the initials elegantly illuminated in red in the text in columns in Gothic characters and without a title page. In the Marsili catalogue it is considered a very rare piece.

Johannes de Ketham, In comincia el dignissimo Fasiculo de medicina in volgare... (1494)

Printed in Venice in 1494, it collects some of the texts that are the basis of the medicine of the time, accompanied by a series of images: the doctor in the study, the visit to the patient's bed, the analysis of the urine with his explanatory model, the body in relation to the influences of the zodiac signs, the woman's body and the body with the various types of traumas. We also find the image of the anatomy lesson, with the doctor reading and with the sector operating on the corpse. It is a woodcut printed in colour, a real rarity for the time.



Ildegarda di Bingen [e altri], Physica S. Hildegardis. Elementorum, fluminum aliquot Germaniæ, metallorum... naturas & operationes (1533)

Printed in Strasbourg in 1533, it has a more modern, Renaissance form, from the characters on the title page, to the initials adorned with putti or Adam and Eve with the serpent, close to the painting of the time (on p. 1 of the text). There are also two large xylographed images showing the visit to the patient with a sickness of internal origin and the human body offended by traumas of external origin.

Ildegarda-1 Ildegarda-2 Xylographs (i.e. incisions on a wood matrix) from Physica (from Phaidra)

Giovanni Battista Della Porta, Phytognomonica (1588)

A curious book – the work of a singular naturalist philosopher, Giovanni Battista della Porta. In the text and in the images, he wants to explain a method for identifying a correspondence between natural forms and diseases of the body to propose a possible cure, in the conviction that like be treated with like.

Della-Porta-1Della-Porta-2 Two tables of the Phytognomonica: plants and other natural elements of similar shape are joined to the parts of the body (from Phaidra)