Introduction

These pages come from the medical section of a book written in central Europe in about 1420-30 (Wellcome Western MS.49). The book is made up of several parts, having a common theme of spiritual and physical health. It was probably produced in a monastic workshop, apparently a house of Augustinian canons, perhaps in Thuringia in east-central Germany. It is mainly written in Latin, with some parts in German, in a Thuringian dialect. The pages are made of vellum (prepared calf-skin), some 400 by 300 mm in size, enclosed in a doe-skin binding. The script is written in dark brown ink and the entire text profusely illustrated with colour-washed line drawings.

The quantity and nature of the pictures in the manuscript suggest that it was produced as an educational work. A monastic audience would have been interested in the spiritual components, but also in the medical section. Religious communities not only cared for the health of their own members but also had a more general medical role, as indicated by the focus on women’s medicine in several of the pages of this manuscript.

The medical pictures are neither original works of art nor drawings from nature. Book production in the Middle Ages did not normally involve the creation of original works of authorship. The compiler of this manuscript would have had access to several exemplars, most now no longer in existence, from which he would have copied, adapted and occasionally mis-copied texts and pictures, to create something like a new edition or anthology. The pictures served to illustrate and explain ideas and functions. As such we can recognise them as perhaps the high point of a tradition of medical illustration (dating back to at least the 12th century), before the advent of naturalism in the Renaissance consigned it to history.