Ketham, Fasiculo de medicina, and Mundinus, Anatomia, Venice, 1493/1494. The mismatched colors of the Sector’s legs remain mysterious.
The Huntington Library holds several incunabular editions of the Fasciculus Medicinae (Little Bundle of Medicine) including the first edition printed in Venice in 1491. The collection of texts included part of Mondino de Liuzzi’s Anatomia and this 1494 edition copies an earlier illustration of a university dissection scene but employed block color printing.
(You can browse through materials from the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences digital collection that have already been made available, including several incunabula.) Mario Molina, that will bring electronic facsimiles of many of these pre-1501 medical items to a worldwide online audience through the Huntington Digital Library. The Huntington is also in the midst of a digitization project, funded by Board of Governors member Dr. Mead counts 532 medical incunables, and in the approximately 90 years since this list was published, the Library has added several dozen additional items, all of which are now in The Huntington’s online catalog. Huntington did not apparently have a special interest in the history of medicine and was interested in these items instead for their rarity, beauty, and significance to the history of printing.Įarly staff members at The Huntington recognized the importance of this collection it was librarian Herman Ralph Mead who in 1931 published "Incunabula Medica in the Huntington Library," a useful text enumerating the material. institutions holding large numbers of incunabula medica today include Harvard University’s Countway Library and the National Library of Medicine, whose collections arose because of a special interest in the history of medicine. Huntington's purchases of so-called incunabula-books, broadsides, or pamphlets printed in Europe following Johannes Gutenberg's revolution in printing but before 1501-were so massive and extensive that he built one of the largest collections of medical incunabula in North America, evidently by accident. It was an extraordinary and somewhat serendipitous occurrence that led to The Huntington's becoming one of the best institutions in the United States to study European medicine from the latter half of the 15th century. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Detail from Es spricht der Meÿster Almanasor, Augsburg, 1483.
Urinalysis was among the most common diagnostic tools of medieval medicine. A physician attends to a bedridden patient and observes a flask of what is likely urine.