ΟΦΘΑΛΜΟΔΟΥΛΕΙΑ, das ist Augendienst: Newer und wolgegründter Bericht von Ursachen und Erkentnüs aller Gebrechen, Schäden und Mängel der Augen und des Gesichtes, wie man solchen anfenglich mit gebürlichen mitteln begegenen, vorkommen und wehren, auch wie man alle solche gebresten künstlich durch Artzney, Instrument vnd Handgrieffe curiren, wircken und vertreiben sol ...
Dresden: Matthes Stöckel, 1583. First edition, a very fine copy, of the founding monument of ophthalmology and one of the supreme achievements of sixteenth-century medical illustration. Written by the Saxon court oculist Georg Bartisch (1535–c. 1607) in vigorous German vernacular, financed and supervised by the author himself, and printed at Dresden by Matthes Stöckel in 1583, the Ophthalmodouleia was conceived as the first complete and experience-based textbook of diseases and surgery of the eye. Its text is accompanied by ninety-one large woodcuts executed after Bartisch's own coloured drawings from life, two of which incorporate layered movable flaps — five on the plate of the head and brain at A5r, six on the plate of the eye at B2v — by which the reader can lift scalp, skull, meninges, and cerebral lobes, or lids, muscles, membranes, and optic nerve, in sequence. These are the earliest surviving flap illustrations in a bound book and the first ever devoted to anatomy: the direct ancestors of the great layered plates of the seventeenth century, culminating in Remmelin's Catoptrum Microcosmicum (1619), and through them of every flap-construction anatomical atlas to the present day. Georg Bartisch was born around 1535 at Königsbrück in the Electorate of Saxony, the son of a barber-surgeon, and was apprenticed in his father’s craft from his early teens. After his master’s death and a long itinerant practice through Saxony, Silesia, and Bohemia he returned to Dresden, where in 1567 Elector August of Saxony took him into his household as personal oculist; the appointment was renewed by August’s successor Christian I in 1586 and held until Bartisch’s death about 1607. The three decades at the Saxon court gave him patronage, a stable income, and direct access to the Dresden printing trade — the conditions under which the present book could be produced. The woodcut portrait at E4v, dated 1583 and showing the author in his forty-eighth year holding instruments and reading a folio of his own design, presents him as a learned craftsman of the Saxon court mode rather than as a humble itinerant. He had married Anna Lehmann in 1561, fathered seven children, and died in some honour at Dresden in or shortly before 1607; the precise date and the circumstances of his last years remain undocumented in the surviving Saxon archives. The earlier Kunstbuch, an unpublished manuscript treatise on lithotomy that he completed at Dresden in 1575 and dedicated to August, survives in a single autograph copy in the Saxon State Library and contains the prototype of the methodological argument later set out in the Ophthalmodouleia — that surgical competence and the artist’s draughtsmanship are aspects of a single craft skill, transferred between practitioners by demonstration and by image more reliably than by text. The 1583 folio is the public realisation of that argument, with the financial and political resources of a long court appointment behind it. Bartisch's career epitomises the transitional world of the Reformation artisan-scientist. Apprenticed as a barber-surgeon and self-taught in anatomy, he practised as an itinerant oculist through Saxony, Silesia, and Bohemia before his appointment as court oculist to Augustus I, Elector of Saxony. He possessed neither Latin nor Greek — the classical phrases with which his book is embellished, beginning with the Greek title ΟΦΘΑΛΜΟΔΟΥΛΕΙΑ itself, were supplied by an unidentified learned contributor whom Hirschberg reasonably conjectures to have been an itinerant scholar or an educated citizen of Dresden, and the vernacular German text itself may well have been put through the hands of a professional scribe before setting. What Bartisch brought to the enterprise was not erudition but an unmatched body of surgical experience and an unusually strong conviction that the surgeon's hand and the artist's eye could transmit practical knowledge independently of scholastic theory. The Ophthalmodouleia is at once a manual and a manifesto, asserting on every page that the craftsman-oculist, working in the language of his patients and trained by long practice rather than by university disputation, is the authoritative guide to the restoration of sight. The book opens with a title printed in red and black within an elaborate woodcut border carrying the Saxon arms, followed on E4v by a full-page portrait of the author at the age of forty-eight, shown holding his instruments beneath the motto Gott ist mein Trost, höchster Hort hie und dort. Its sixteen parts proceed by method from the anatomy and physiology of the head through specific diseases of the lids, cornea, lens, and optic apparatus — their causes, symptoms, prognoses, and cures — to a closing sequence on pharmacology and magic, in which recipes for collyria and ointments stand alongside accounts of amulets, charms, and astrological prescriptions for the timing of ocular operations. The combination is characteristic of the moment: Bartisch's empirical observation is framed throughout by a Lutheran piety that reads the body as an image of divine order, and by a belief in celestial influence upon organs of the eye that was then perfectly compatible with the most advanced surgical practice. The astrological counsel, the prescriptions against witchcraft (the fourth woodcut depicts expressly a disease of the eye caused by witchcraft), and the amulets recommended to patients do not stand apart from the medicine but run through it; for Bartisch the coherence is unembarrassed, the body a microcosm whose parts answer to the larger order of creation. The illustrations are the work's pre-eminent achievement. Cut after Bartisch's own drawings by a collaborator identified only by the monogram H.H., very likely Hans Hewamaul of Dresden, they translate his programme of craft authority into visual form. Each plate pictures a distinct moment of observation or surgical action: swollen eyelids, the stages of cataract couching with the patient bound and steadied by an assistant while the surgeon's needle enters the limbus at a precise angle, the removal of chalazia, the dressing of burns, the use of forceps and hooks. The surgical instruments themselves — knives, needles, cauteries, spoons, scarificators, forceps — are pictured throughout at exact scale and labelled in Gothic script, forming the earliest printed typology of ophthalmic tools and constituting, in their own right, a major document for the history of surgical instrument-making. Bartisch states that all of the instruments shown are his own inventions, developed in the course of long practice, and that the drawing of them was as much a part of their transmission as the manual training required to wield them. The illustrations alternate dark contour and open surface with an economy that makes them immediately legible; their spare backgrounds and directness of gaze produce a surgical realism without precedent in the medical literature of the sixteenth century. At the head of the work the two famous flap plates enact a virtual dissection. The plate of the head and brain, composed from five overlaid printed sheets cut and pasted with great precision, allows the reader to lift the scalp to reveal the skull, the skull to reveal the meninges, the meninges to reveal the cerebral lobes, and the lobes to reveal the ventricular cavities. The plate of the eye, composed from six overlaid sheets, performs the equivalent dissection of the ocular apparatus from eyelid to optic nerve. Broadside fugitive sheets of similar construction had been issued at Strasbourg by Heinrich Vogtherr the Elder from the late 1530s for a popular market, but Bartisch's innovation was to embed the layered technique in a learned and durable folio, printed on heavy paper specifically chosen to support the weight of the assembled flaps. The mechanical ingenuity of the construction — copies are still fully functional four centuries on — illustrates the shared culture of print, craft, and instrument-making that surrounded Bartisch in Reformation Saxony, the same court culture that produced the fine astronomical instruments, mechanical clocks, and Kunstkammer collections of Augustus I's Dresden. The Ophthalmodouleia functions in this sense as its own Kunstkammer of the eye, a museum in octavo gatherings in which text, image, and mechanism compose a single didactic ensemble. Susanna Berger has recently reconstructed Bartisch's own theoretical account of this visual programme. His prior manuscript Kunstbuch (1575), a treatise on lithotomy, already set out the argument that expertise in painting and drawing guarantees physical and mental dexterity in surgery — that the trained hand of the draughtsman and the trained hand of the surgeon are, in the relevant respects, the same hand. In the Ophthalmodouleia this claim is generalised: the prints are characterised as counterfeit images, a genre of representation grounded either on unmediated observation of a specimen or on a drawing made in the immediate presence of the object. Since oculists and barber-surgeons in Bartisch's day were regarded with deep professional suspicion — the itinerant cataract-coucher was a stock figure of Renaissance satire — Bartisch's methodological investment in pictorial accuracy was also an investment in his own credibility: the prints are at once surgical instruction and authorial warrant. Read in this light, the Ophthalmodouleia stands alongside Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) as the period's most accomplished visual anatomy, but the two books belong to different worlds. Vesalius's figures inhabit the classical theatre of the body; Bartisch's inhabit the workshop, stripped of allegory and grounded in the quotidian labour of treating sight. The surgical content of the book preserves invaluable testimony to late-Renaissance ocular practice. Bartisch distinguishes true cataract — opacity of the crystalline lens — from false cataract arising from corneal scarring, and describes the stages of couching and postoperative care with a thoroughness unmatched in the prior literature. He gives the first clear printed accounts of trichiasis, chalazion, and lacrimal fistula; his chapters on ocular burns and injuries display a rudimentary but effective grasp of what would later be called antisepsis, warning against caustic metallic compounds and advocating gentle healing salves; and he was the first surgeon to perform, and to describe in print, the total extirpation of the eyeball and its orbital contents in cancer of the orbit, for which he developed a knife-shaped spoon of his own design. At an age in which the itinerant quack was the public face of eye surgery, his insistence on attentive postoperative care was itself a quiet reform. He was, however, a vigorous opponent of spectacles, which he held to be an insulting interposition between the eye and the world and the long-term cause of vision's further decay — an eccentricity consistent with his broader commitment to the organic restoration of sight. The printing itself reflects the highest ambitions of a provincial Saxon press. Stöckel's types are strong and even, the large Fraktur giving the text-block visual gravity appropriate to the subject; the heavy paper was chosen to support both the mounted flap constructions and the full-page woodcuts. The combination of vernacular language, monumental folio format, and visual complexity makes the Ophthalmodouleia one of the most technically demanding German books of its century. Each flap plate required hand-cutting and manual assembly at the press, and surviving copies show slight variations in the construction consistent with one-by-one finishing. The entire cost of production was borne by Bartisch himself — an act of self-publication unusual for a craftsman-surgeon of modest social origin, and a measure of the programmatic seriousness with which he intended the book to be received. The influence of the Ophthalmodouleia was immediate and durable. Its vernacular clarity made it the standard German authority on eye surgery for more than a century. A Frankfurt issue appeared in 1584, and a substantially abridged Nuremberg edition in 1686; manuscript copies of the illustrations circulated across Europe, and the layered flap construction was adopted by later anatomists, most influentially by Johann Remmelin in his Catoptrum Microcosmicum of 1619, whose famous composite anatomical plates are direct structural descendants of Bartisch's prototypes. Beyond its specific progeny, the book contributed to establishing surgery as a visually transmitted discipline — the proposition, later to become commonplace, that accurate images combined with skilled demonstration could substitute for, and even outperform, formal academic instruction in the training of practitioners. In the history of medical book-design, as in the history of ophthalmology itself, it is a foundational text. The present copy carries a highly suggestive early provenance. On the upper cover of the contemporary German vellum binding is struck in blind the owner's name and date of acquisition — NICODEMVS EVLER 1587 — in large Roman capitals applied with individual letter-tools, and on the front pastedown is a matching Latin ex-libris, Sum Nicodemi Euleri ex legitimo pretio Anno 1587. The consistent V-for-U orthography, together with the form of the surname, identifies Nicodemus Euler as a member of the Upper Rhenish or Swiss Euler family (variously Evler, Ewler, Eüler), documented in the later sixteenth century in the Free Imperial City of Lindau on Lake Constance and in Basel. Hans Georg Euler, born at Lindau before 11 February 1573 and married at Basel on 17 June 1594 to Ursula Ringsgwandt, was the founder of the Basel line from which, five generations later, Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) would descend. Nicodemus's acquisition date of 1587 places him in the generation immediately preceding that naturalisation, and on the evidence of his possession of a vernacular surgical manual — the intended readership of which was precisely the literate barber-surgeons and apothecaries practising outside the universities — he may reasonably be conjectured a kinsman of the Lindau Eulers, perhaps of Hans Georg's father's generation. The blind-stamped supralibros and matching Latin ex-libris suggest an owner proud enough of his acquisition to mark it both externally and internally, and literate enough in Latin to compose the formula himself. Whether the line of possession from Nicodemus runs directly to Hans Georg — and thence, across a century, to Leonhard — is not demonstrable on present evidence, but the surname, the region, and the date fall within a corridor narrow enough to make the connection plausible, and sufficient in itself to give the copy a distinct identity within the larger corpus of Bartisch survivors. The survival of copies with the flap constructions intact is exceptionally rare. The layered paper is fragile, the adhesive early-modern, and the mechanical action of centuries of lifting and refolding has rendered most surviving copies partially or wholly incomplete at these plates. The present copy preserves both plates in fully functional state, the flaps operating as Bartisch designed them to operate, so that the virtual dissection of head and eye can still be performed in the manner intended. The lifting and refolding of the paper produces a sound not unlike the opening of lids, and the image of the eye — organ of light, mirror of God's creation in the Lutheran anatomy — appears and vanishes again as the sequence progresses. Few printed books of the sixteenth century so completely embody their subject in their form; still fewer survive in a state to demonstrate it. References: PMM 79 — Garrison–Morton 5817 — Norman 125 — Grolier/Norman, One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine 22 — Choulant–Frank 234 — Heirs of Hippocrates 369 — Wellcome 697 — Waller 756 — Becker 22 — Hirschberg, Geschichte der Augenheilkunde II, pp. 323–342 — Gorin, History of Ophthalmology, pp. 37–38 — Lilly, p. 49 — Berger, ‘Bartisch’s Ophthalmodouleia and His Theory’, Early Science and Medicine 26 (2021), pp. 1–50 — Blodi (trans.), Ophthalmodouleia: That is the Service of the Eyes, 1996. Folio (297 × 187 mm), ff. [xxviii], 274, [8], Gothic type, foliated, title printed in red and black within woodcut border (repeated in the preliminaries at C1r); large woodcut arms of Duke August of Saxony at A2r; full-page woodcut portrait of the author at E4v; numerous large woodcuts in the text (a few repeats), the woodcuts at A5r and B2v with overlays of five and six flaps respectively, printer’s woodcut device at the end. Contemporary German vellum over pasteboards, gently yapp-edged, the surface smooth and naturally aged to a light fawn tone; the endpapers and turn-ins lined with recycled manuscript fragments in a compact late-medieval Latin hand (visible under the pastedowns and within the inner joints), traces of early green silk markers; minor 6 cm split to the front hinge and a short tear at the headcap, the structure entirely sound and unrepaired. Internally clean and bright, the fragile composite plates complete and fully functional, the flaps preserved in remarkable state.
Item #6511
Price: $135,000.00
