Dioscorides De Medica Materia and Ferri De Ligni Sancti, printed editions, annotated by Blasius Thammöller

Printed volume comprising two works bound together, namely:

Dioscorides Pedanius of Anazarbos: Pedanii Dioscoridis Anazarbei De Medica Materia Libri sex, Joanne Ruellio Suessionensi interprete, nunc primum ab ipso Ruellio recogniti, & suo nitori restituti: His Accessit, Praeter Pharmacorum simplicium catalogum copiosus omnium fere medelarum sive curationum Index (Basel: Michael Isengrim, 1539). Dioscorides' De Medica Materia, a compendium of medical botany, was first printed in 1516; Jean Ruel's translation is generally seen as the best sixteeenth-cedntury Latin version of Dioscorides.

Alfonso Ferri, De ligni sancti multiplici medicina, et vini exhibitione (Basel: J. Bebel, 1538). This is the rare second edition of Ferri's work on the treatment of syphilis using guaiacum.

Both works are annotated by Blasius Thammöller (whose signature, dated, occurs on the rear paste-down), the Dioscorides particularly extensively and in three languages (German, Greek and Latin). Thammöller's annotations draw on other authors, both medical and non-medical, and effectively transform the Dioscorides text into a manual of his own knowledge and practice.

c.1539

1 volume One volume, in contemporary binding (pigskin over wooden boards, blind-stamped, roll-tooled border with images of Justice, Patience and Lucretia, dated 1538; central panel with roses and fleurs de lis), with clasps, ties and a few place-markers, and the authors' names stencilled on the fore-edge of the pages.

Internal transfer from the library at Wellcome Collection's Early Printed Books collection, c.2001; originally purchased from Martayan Lan Rare Books, New York.

Blasius Thammöller was apparently, at the time that he annotated these texts, a medical student in Leipzig; later in his career he occurs apparently as a member of the Leipzig medical faculty, responding to a thesis in 1548 and presiding over one in 1552.

In other repositories:

Copies of the Dioscorides text, without annotations, are in the Hof- und Stiftsbibliothek at Aschaffenburg, the Universitätsbibliothek at Freiburg im Breisgau, the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek in Göttingen, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel and the Ratschulbibliothek in Zwickau. The copy in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has been digitised at http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00015531/image_1.

Greek