JOHN OF GADDESDEN.

2 works in 1 volume, small folio, (4) + 173 leaves, (1) leaf (blank); (24) unnumbered leaves. Text in double columns, initials in alternating red and blue over printed guide letters, paragraph marks in red throughout, woodcut printer’s device at end. Title finger-soiled in lower corner and with added details of the author and imprint in manuscript, ink stain on extreme fore-edges in first and last gatherings, b2 in second work with long vertical tear in inner margin repaired, some small stains and finger-soiling, some minor spotting or browning. Contemporary calf over wooden boards, ruled and stamped in blind in different designs (endpapers replaced in the 18th or 19th century and first and last gatherings re-hinged with vellum, tips of corners neatly repaired, joints cracked but perfectly strong, lacking clasps, some wormholes on lower cover). Provenance: Numerous contemporary marginal notes in Latin, especially in the first 30 leaves. Early signature of (?)Stephan Ruders— on title; Antoine François du Fourcroy (1755–1809), chemist, with a long bibliographical note possibly in his hand on free endpaper; his sale by Tillard, Paris, 10th December 1810, lot 1213; Bernard Quaritch Ltd. catalogue 1149; bookplates of Kenneth Rapoport and Eugene S. Flamm.

1. FIRST EDITION of the first printed medical book by an Englishman. John of Gaddesden (d. 1348 or 1349) was a court physician who left a considerable reputation. He was the first major medical scholar to have been trained wholly in England, and the only Oxford-trained medieval physician to achieve recognition on the Continent. He practised the arts of the surgeon and barber-surgeon as well as those of the physician. His Rosa Anglica, written in about 1313, was a distillation of the works of more than forty-six medical authorities, ancient and recent, but it also contains a good many original remarks which illustrate the character of the author more than his medical knowledge. The book begins with an account of fevers based on Galen’s arrangement, then goes through diseases and injuries beginning with the head. The last part is on wounds, fractures, hernias, etc. The work ends with an antidotarium or treatise on remedies (see DNB and ODNB). The book contains some remarks on cooking, and innumerable prescriptions, many of which are superstitious, while others prove to be common-sense remedies when carefully considered. It includes “the familiar skin diseases and made some interesting observations, including reference to the use of red light in the treatment of smallpox, which was revived on scientific grounds by Finson six hundred years later” (Pusey, History of dermatology, p. 38). The author’s disposition and his peculiarities are so precisely those of the ‘Doctour of Physik’ in Chaucer’s prologue, where he is mentioned in line 434, that it seems possible that Gaddesden is the contemporary from whom Chaucer drew this character. Bernard of Gordon was also mentioned by Chaucer in the same sentence as Gaddesden as an authority on medicine. 2. FIRST EDITION of the second printed book on urology together with Bernard’s brief tract on the pulse, two of the few diagnostic measures available to physicians at that time. These two tracts were added to later editions of Bernard’s Lilium medicinae. “He divided disorders of the bladder into strangury, or the passage of urine drop by drop, and dysuria or the retention of urine” (Murphy, The history of urology, p. 43). The Lilium medicinae, which was completed at Montpellier in 1305, is thought to have inspired John of Gaddesden’s title for the Rosa Anglica, which actually contains quotes from the Lilium. 1: Klebs 424.1 (the only incunable edition). G&M 2191. 2: Klebs 180.1.