HEAVILY ANNOTATED HIPPOCRATES
HIPPOCRATES.
Ἱπποκράτους Κώου ιατρού παλαιοτάτου, πάντων ἄλλων κορυφαίου, βιβλία ἅπαντα. Hippocratis Coi medici vetustissimi, et omnium aliorum principis, libri omnes, ad vetustos codices summo studio collati et restaurati.
Basel, Hieronymus Froben and Nicolaus Episcopius, 1538.
Folio, pp. [8], 562, [2]; dedication in Latin, text in Greek; woodcut printer’s device to title and final page, capital spaces with guide letters; slight browning, a few marks and ink stains, marginal damp staining to last few leaves; a very good copy in seventeenth-century calf, spine gilt in compartments with lettering piece; rubbed and worn, some loss to lower compartment of spine; extensive marginal ink annotations in a late seventeenth-century hand throughout, with a few others in a sixteenth-century hand (mostly crossed through) and some eighteenth-century pencil notes, in Latin with occasional Greek; eighteenth-century manuscript table of Greek ligatures pasted to front free endpaper.
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Ἱπποκράτους Κώου ιατρού παλαιοτάτου, πάντων ἄλλων κορυφαίου, βιβλία ἅπαντα. Hippocratis Coi medici vetustissimi, et omnium aliorum principis, libri omnes, ad vetustos codices summo studio collati et restaurati.
A heavily annotated copy of the second Greek edition of Hippocrates’s Works, a much more accurate text than the first, Aldine, edition of 1526. Janus Cornarius (1500–1558) undertook this edition of Hippocrates at the suggestion of Erasmus. He claimed to have corrected or re-established more than four thousand passages which had been omitted or adulterated in the Aldine edition.
In his preface, Cornarius pays tribute to the scholar printers Hieronymus Froben and Nicolaus Episcopius, mentioning the three ancient manuscripts which their endeavours procured for him for the preparation of this edition. These manuscripts came from notable collections: the library of the Augsburg physician Adolpho Occo, which was inherited in 1503 by his nephew Pompeius Occo, factor of the Fugger family in Holland and a leading Humanist of Amsterdam; the collection of Johann von Dalberg, whose ‘rich collection of manuscripts and incunabula at the castle of Ladenburg … remained a Mecca for scholars and printers throughout the sixteenth century’ (Contemporaries of Erasmus); the third manuscript belonged to Hieronymus Gemuseus, professor of physics at Basel, who made major contributions to the great Basel editions of Galen, in Greek, 1537–38, and Aristotle, in Latin, 1542 and 1548.
This copy shows at least three campaigns of annotation, with the majority of the marginalia in a single late seventeenth-century hand. These run throughout the volume and provide Latin summaries of the adjacent Greek text, dividing it into chapters and further subdivisions for ease of reference, and providing cross references. The unusual thoroughness of the marginalia (sometimes crossed through and rewritten, sometimes comprising two columns side by side in the margin) indicates an extremely devoted student of the Hippocratic corpus; they may well have been compiled for teaching, or with some editorial objective in mind. While almost every page bears annotations, some of the works which appear to have particularly interested our annotator include On the art of medicine, On the nature of the child, On the places in man, On regimen in acute diseases, On the diseases of women, and Epidemics.
Adams H-564; Durling, NLM 16th cent., 2317; Waller 4486; Wellcome 3174.
