GUIDI, Guido (known as Vidus VIDIUS) [NICETAS].

Chirurgia è Graeco in Latinum conversa, Vido Vidio Florentino interprete, cum nonnullis eiusdem Vidij com[m]entariis.

Paris: Pierre Gaultier, 30 April 1544.

First edition, in entirely untouched contemporary limp vellum, of the most beautiful surgical book of the Renaissance and one of the three great illustrated medical books of the mid-sixteenth century, with Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543) and Estienne’s De dissectione (1545). The volume is exceptionally fine, large and fresh, the sheets entirely uncropped: most surviving copies have suffered the binder’s plough, with the larger woodcuts trimmed; here the generous margins are preserved throughout, and the original sixteenth-century limp vellum wrappers, with their thong remnants, remain in place. We know of no similarly fine copy to have come on the market since the one offered by Quaritch in 1977 (Catalogue 969, no. 120). Writing in 1560, Leonardo Botallo observed that the book was already very rare less than twenty years after its appearance, and it was never reprinted in its original form (Brockbank, p. 278).

The work is a collection of Latin translations from the Greek of treatises on ulcers, wounds, fractures, dislocations, bandaging, and surgical apparatus by Hippocrates, Galen, and Oribasius, together with commentaries by Galen and by Vidius (Guido Guidi) himself. The translations were made from a tenth-century illustrated Byzantine Greek manuscript known as the Nicetas Codex — the earliest surviving surgical codex, whose pictorial content goes back to a Greek exemplar of the first century BCE. Surgery had lain dormant for more than a thousand years: Hippocrates died about 370 BCE, Galen about 200 AD, Oribasius about 403, and even the Byzantine manuscript that Guidi translated was already six centuries old when he read it. Much of the classical teaching was sound, and the Chirurgia represents, in effect, the consolidated state of surgical knowledge in the middle of the sixteenth century. Real advances in surgery would not come until James Young Simpson gave it anaesthesia with chloroform in 1847 and Joseph Lister gave it antisepsis in the 1860s, three hundred years after Gaultier struck off the first impression of the present book; in the meantime Guidi’s edition provided the working surgeon of the Renaissance with as complete an account of the ancient art as had ever been assembled.

The book contains roughly 210 text woodcuts, of which thirty are full-page; the latter are concentrated in the Hippocratic treatises on fractures and dislocations, with the smaller figures threaded through Galen on bandaging and Oribasius on slings and machines. Most of the designs are copied or adapted from the Nicetas Codex, but a substantial number — notably those in Oribasius’s De machinamentis — are original. They were long attributed, on the strength of a brief reference in Guidi’s Latin manuscript, to the Italian mannerist Francesco Primaticcio; the stylistic and documentary case worked through by Peter Kellett in 1958 and by Michael Hirst in 1969 now assigns them to Francesco Salviati (Francesco de’ Rossi) and a pupil, with the designs probably prepared in Rome before Guidi left Italy for Paris. The identity of the woodcutter has never been settled: three distinct monograms appear in the blocks (Denys Janot’s ‘F’ artist, the monogrammist ‘APF’, and a third signed with the Cross of Lorraine), and Choulant and Mortimer both thought the last might be François Jollat, the engraver of the woodcut skeletons in Estienne’s De dissectione the following year. The pictorial material itself was traced by Hermann Schöne (Apollonius von Kitium, Leipzig, 1896) back to the commentary of Apollonius of Kitium on the Hippocratic Peri arthron, composed between 85 and 51 BCE. Transmitted from late-antique Alexandria or Cyprus to Byzantium, and thence through the Nicetas Codex and Guidi’s Latin version to Renaissance Paris, the images may be taken to embody the genuine Hippocratic tradition of surgical practice as it descended through late-antique and Byzantine medicine.

Guidi was born in Florence in 1509 into a fortunate marriage of art and medicine: his father Giuliano was a physician, and his mother Costanza was the granddaughter of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio and brought to her marriage a dowry of seven hundred florins. Little is recorded of his early education, or of where (if anywhere) he took a medical degree. In his early thirties his friend Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, the Florentine bibliophile then reckoned the foremost patron of letters in Italy, drew his attention to a collection of surgical manuscripts assembled by the tenth-century Byzantine physician Nicetas, some of them accompanied by pictures prepared for instruction: notably thirty full-size plates illustrating Apollonius’s commentary on the Hippocratic treatise on dislocations, and many smaller figures running through Galen’s treatise on bandaging. Executed in pen and brush, the Byzantine images show the manipulations and apparatus used in reducing dislocations and fractures, each dark-brown figure surmounted by an ornate and highly coloured Byzantine archway. Their ultimate origin, as Brockbank reconstructs it, lies with Apollonius himself, and the Greek drawings were probably made during or shortly after his lifetime; the Galenic illustrations are of the second century AD.

The subsequent career of the Nicetas manuscript is one of the Renaissance’s more elegant scholarly transmissions. In 1492 — or, by some accounts, 1495 — the Greek scholar Janus Lascaris (1445–1535) bought the codex in Crete on behalf of Lorenzo de’ Medici. By 1530 it had passed to Giulio de’ Medici, Pope Clement VII, who lent it back to Lascaris for a proposed (but never completed) edition of the medical and surgical texts. A copy made by Lascaris, now in the Bibliothèque nationale at Paris, was used by Ferdinando Balami for the first Latin translation of Galen’s On Bones (1535). That copy, illuminated by Santorinos of Rhodes, then passed into the library of Cardinal Ridolfi, who had a further copy made by Christoph Auer and dispatched as a gift to Francis I of France in 1542; it was taken to Paris by a young Florentine physician, Guido Guidi, who had prepared in parallel a Latin translation of the surgical texts — the translation that was to become the present book (Nutton, in Grafton et al., The Classical Tradition, 2010, p. 638). The original Nicetas Codex was later acquired by Ridolfi himself and is now in the Biblioteca Laurenziana at Florence (Plut. 74.7).

Francis I had founded the Collège Royal in 1530 to teach the humanities, and had drawn to France a constellation of Italian talent — Leonardo da Vinci among them. Hearing that Guidi was about to publish a book on surgery, and conscious of the mortality among his troops in the nearly continuous wars of his reign, Francis invited the young physician to Paris, installed him as personal physician, and appointed him first professor of anatomy and medicine at the Collège Royal — a chair he held from 1542 until 1548. His lectures became celebrated, and he is remembered as the founder of medical teaching in Paris. Soon after his arrival Guidi formed a close friendship with the sculptor, goldsmith, and adventurer Benvenuto Cellini, then resident in Paris in the same king’s service. Cellini, who suffered from a remarkable assortment of illnesses, was attended at various times by Guidi and by Berengario da Carpi, and in his autobiography he describes Guidi as the most cultivated, affectionate, and companionable man of worth he had ever known, an able physician, a doctor of medicine, and a nobleman of Florence. Cellini invited Guidi to take a suite of rooms in the wing of his Paris chateau, the Petit-Nesle, which stood directly across the Seine from the main entrance of the Louvre; the two men lived there together for about six years. The Petit-Nesle contained a number of smaller suites, one of which was occupied by a printer, Pierre Gaultier, whose entire premises lay within the chateau. It was Gaultier who in April 1544 produced the present book, under privilege from the Pope, the King of France, and the Duke of Ferrara, and dedicated to Francis I (who had financed its publication), to Paul III, and to Ercole II d’Este.

The treatises included, with their page-openings in this edition, are these. From Hippocrates (c. 460 – c. 370 BCE): De ulceribus (on ulcers), p. 1; De fistulis (on fistulas), p. 47; and De vulneribus capitis (on head wounds), p. 61. From Galen (129 – c. 210 AD): In Hippocratem de fracturis commentaria (three commentaries on Hippocrates on fractures), p. 131; In Hippocratem de articulis commentaria (four commentaries on Hippocrates on dislocations, themselves based on the commentary of Apollonius of Kitium), p. 215; In Hippocratem de officina medici commentaria (three commentaries on the Hippocratic treatise On the surgery), p. 343; and De fasciis (on bandages), p. 415. From Oribasius (c. 320 – c. 403): De laqueis ex Heracle (on slings and ligatures, after Heraklas), p. 467; and De machinamentis ex Heliodoro (on surgical apparatus, after Heliodorus), p. 477.

The illustrative programme opens in earnest with Hippocrates on fractures, after two unillustrated treatises on ulcers and fistulas and a partially illustrated treatise on head wounds showing three types of trephine (cylindrical saws for removing a disc of bone) and the associated hammers and chisels, none of which appears in the tenth-century manuscript and all of which are therefore sixteenth-century interpolations. The first fracture picture shows the treatment of a fractured humerus by extension: a sling is fixed from the roof to the patient’s axilla, a heavy boulder is suspended from the forearm, and the hand is supported on a cushion on the table (p. 157). Four further pictures show crude traction apparatus substantially as it had been used in antiquity; one, original to this edition, shows traction applied to a lower leg by two levers, the tapes (lora) of leather thongs, as Hippocrates had recommended. Next comes the treatise on dislocations, picturing the reduction of a dislocated shoulder over the operator’s fist (a manoeuvre only possible if the patient can stand or sit), or over the heel placed in the axilla if he must lie down, or over the operator’s shoulder in the favoured method of the classical Greek gymnasia (pp. 221, 226); Hippocrates’s best restoration was over a beam or a door, with a wooden splint on the medial side of the arm (p. 233). The Chirurgia reaches one of its more disquieting illustrative passages in the treatment of scoliosis and kyphosis. The classical method was to fix the patient to a padded ladder, let the weight of his body stretch the spinal column, and then — depending on whether the curvature was high or low — orient him either erect or head-downwards and drop the ladder sharply onto resistant material from the height of a tower or pediment (p. 279). Even Hippocrates expressed reservations, observing that the method was practised by publicity-seeking doctors not much interested in outcomes. A second technique depicted is scarcely less brutal: the spine is placed on traction by leather thongs and levers, and a beam pivoted in a hole in the wall is driven, by one operator or if necessary two, against the apex of the deformity (p. 289), an instrument Hippocrates himself judged more suitable for torture than for medicine.

The illustrator rests through the Hippocratic materia medica and returns with 136 woodcuts for Galen on bandaging, each type of dressing displayed on a full male or female figure or on a hand, leg, foot, or head in a medallion, the bandages lettered so that a surgeon could apply them from the book — though some of the patterns are so complex as to suggest that they could never have stayed in position for long. The last of the translations, Oribasius’s De machinamentis, is not illustrated in the original manuscript; it is in this section that Guidi and his artists produced new apparatus of their own, drawn from wooden models. The first is a windlass applied to one of the lower rungs of a ladder, shown in use for the reduction of a fractured humerus (p. 493); the second is an ingenious yoked apparatus for the reduction of a dislocated shoulder or other upper-limb injury (pp. 513, 515), the patient standing on a stool that is kicked away when the apparatus reaches its maximum traction, so that the dislocation reduces itself. Guidi then turns to the Hippocratic scamnum, a reducing bench of which he presents a sturdier version slotted down the midline to admit a perineal bar (p. 519); one such machine survives in the Wellcome collection, recovered from an Italian monastery where it had been pressed into service, upside down, as a refectory table, and possibly made in Florence in Guidi’s own lifetime. Guidi’s modification of the scamnum for a fracture of the shaft of the humerus (p. 524) is a real mechanical improvement; his extension of the bench to the reduction of a dislocated lower jaw (p. 521) is a Vidian invention rather than a classical one, and its practicability is open to doubt.

Francis I died in March 1547, three years after the Chirurgia appeared. Guidi had planned a Greek edition of the same material and had retained the Nicetas Codex in Paris for that purpose, but with the king’s death the project was abandoned and Guidi was recalled to Italy; this is possibly why the original codex remained in Italian hands while most of Ridolfi’s other manuscripts passed to France. In Florence, Guidi became personal physician to Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, and at the ducal university at Pisa professor of philosophy and medicine; there he carried out anatomical investigations that, according to the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, gave him a knowledge of the vertebrae, cartilaginous structures, and cranial bones beyond anything achieved by his predecessors. He was ennobled by the duke and took holy orders. The anatomical work was left unfinished at his death in 1569, and was completed and published by his nephew between 1596 and 1611 as De anatome corporis humani libri VII; it is in that posthumous volume that Guidi first described the pterygoid canal of the sphenoid bone and the nerve and artery running through it — the three structures known ever since to every skull-base surgeon as the Vidian canal, the Vidian nerve, and the Vidian artery (Garrison-Morton 380n).

The Chirurgia is celebrated in the history of medicine, but it is also a substantial — and in some respects a founding — document in the history of mathematics. Oribasius’s De laqueis ex Heracle, occupying pp. 467–476 of the present edition, may be considered the first printed work on knot theory. Clear depictions of knots are strikingly rare in ancient painting and on earthenware, a fact that has been attributed to the magical or religious significance attached to them and to the consequent reluctance of artists to depict them accurately. The oldest written source on the subject, and the only one known before the eighteenth century, is Oribasius’s medical encyclopaedia, the Iatrikon synagogus, compiled in the fourth century AD; Oribasius himself reports that his material is derived from Heraklas, a physician of about AD 100 (Turner, p. viii). The knots recorded are those used by physicians for slings, or as components of slings, in operations and in the treatment of fractures, and De laqueis is one of the few portions of the Iatrikon synagogus to have survived at all. In it Heraklas describes sixteen distinct knots and slings, including — to use the modern names — the cow hitch and the clove hitch, the noose, the reef (or square) knot, the true lover’s knot, the bottle sling, and a figure-of-string known to Aboriginal Australians as the sun-clouded-over (p. 474); several of Heraklas’s knots are still in routine use in surgery and were carefully redescribed, under their classical names, by C. L. Day in his Art of Knotting and Splicing (US Naval Institute, 1970).

The book carries a mid-eighteenth-century ink ownership mark, ‘Ex libris Laurentii Napolioni’, on the front pastedown, with manuscript notes in the same hand on the front free endpaper. Two contemporary annotations in a sixteenth-century humanist hand run in the margins of Galen on fractures (e.g. at p. 185, underscoring Galen on the external use of wine and keyed by a marginal note in brown ink), and an early ink title-piece, ‘VIDO·VIDIO·SVP·HIPPOCRATE’, runs across the top edge of the text block in the same humanist hand. The Napolione library has not been firmly identified, but it was evidently a notable one: the same ownership mark appears in the copy of Nicolò Massa’s Liber de morbo gallo (Venice, 1535) catalogued as Bibliotheca Osleriana 3231, and in the copy of Prézel’s Dizionario del cittadino (Nice, 1763) listed in the Bibliotheca Encyclopaedica, p. 118.

References: Bibliotheca Osleriana 155 (lacking the last three treatises) — Brunet I, 1845 — Choulant-Frank, pp. 211–212 — Cushing G445 — Dibner, Heralds of Science 118 — Durling 2204 — Garrison-Morton 4406.1 — Graesse II, 134 — Heirs of Hippocrates 158 — Lilly 6 — Mortimer (French) 242 — Norman 954 — Thornton, p. 71 — Waller 1960 — Wellcome I, 6596 — not in Adams, Fairfax Murray, or Rothschild — Herrlinger, History of Medical Illustration (1970), pp. 15, 143 — W. R. LeFanu, ‘The Lost Half of Vesalius’s Anatomy’, in Brockbank, ‘The man who was Vidius’, Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 19 (1956), pp. 269–295 — Kellett, ‘The School of Salviati and the Illustrations to the Chirurgia of Vidius Vidius, 1544’, Medical History 2 (1958), pp. 264–268 — Hirst, ‘Salviati illustrateur de Vidius’, Revue de l’Art 6 (1969), pp. 19–28 — Turner & van de Griend (eds.), History and Science of Knots (Singapore, 1996).

Folio (375 × 242 mm), pp. [36, the last blank], 534, [2], including the final blank (lacking in the Harvard, Durling, and Waller copies). Roman and Greek types, approximately 210 woodcut illustrations in the text, thirty of them full-page, with numerous ornamental metalcut initials. Contemporary limp vellum, sewn on three thongs visible at the spine, the covers a little warped at the fore-edge but structurally sound, the early shelfmark ‘42’ in brown ink at the foot of the spine. A superb, entirely untouched copy throughout, the generous margins preserved everywhere. Housed in a modern dark-brown morocco solander box, the spine lettered in gilt VIDIUS / CHIRURGIA / PARIS 1544.

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Item #6623

Price: $125,000.00