BERNARD OF GORDON.

Small folio, 2 parts in 1 volume, 96 + 33 numbered leaves (a–m8, aa–ee6, lacking the final blank ee6). Large and small woodcut initials, text in double columns. Intermittent minor spotting and staining but a little heavier on title and last leaf, also lower corner of gathering d, two short wormtracks in inner margin of gathering g touching a few letters. Early vellum (upper inner hinge separating, wormhole at foot of spine, some discolouring of endpapers), lettered in manuscript on spine. Provenance: ‘Cremonese’ inscribed at top of title, also an inscription partly erased, a few very brief marginal notes; bookplate of Eugene S. Flamm.

The final incunable edition, the seventh overall, of the Practica or Lilium Medicinae, the principal work of one of the medical luminaries of the Middle Ages, Bernard of Gordon (c. 1258–1318), of Scottish descent but born in France, a professor at Montpellier from 1283 to 1307. He spent his entire teaching career at Montpellier and contributed greatly to the university’s fame as the oustanding medical school in Europe. He completed the Lilium in 1305. In the Dark Ages (476–1000), European medicine was entirely in the hands of the Jewish and Arabian physicians when the founding of the medical school at Salerno in the eleventh century began to breathe new life into medicine. The Lilium preserves the Arabic tradition but also contains much original material, and is one of the works which laid the foundations of medical literature in the fourteenth century, from the Schools of Montpellier, Paris, Bologna and Padua. It contains, inter alia, the first description of a modern truss, the first mention of spectacles (oculus berellinus), and the suggestion that muscles move due to a mechanical action of the nerves. Modern studies have been made of Bernard’s treatises on epilepsy, marasmus, smallpox and urology. The second part of this volume is Bernard’s treatise on urines, one of the few diagnostic measures available to physicians at the time. The Lilium was translated in the Middle Ages into French (Lyon, 1495), German, Hebrew, Irish, and Spanish (Seville, 1495), but never into English, although Bernard was cited by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales as an authority on medicine. Demaitre says of Bernard (p. 169): “It would be difficult to find a more worthy representative of Montpellier’s claim to fame, of the academic tradition, and of the medical profession around 1300 than Bernard of Gordon.” Klebs 177.5; see also 180.1, the first separate printing of De Urinis in 1487. G&M 8369 and Stillwell, The awakening interest in science, III, 312 (first edition of 1480). Luke E. Demaitre, Doctor Bernard de Gordon: professor and practitioner (Toronto, 1980), includes a list of the 11 editions printed from 1480 to 1617.