De arthritide tractatus...appendicis loco libro tertio practicae adjectus; cui accessit Tragopodagra Luciani

by Daniel Sennert | Lucian (pseudo?) | Lucian translated by Erasmus Schmidt

Wittenberg: Ambrosius Rothe for the heirs of Zacharias Schürer, 1631

107 p., p. 109, [5], 109-132, [3] p. | 4to | A-R^4 S^2 | 205 x 162 mm

First edition of the celebrated German physician's treatise on gout (though we expect some of the content should be found in the handful of academic disputations Sennert published on the same subject starting in 1615). The work seems to have been appended to the second edition of v. 3 of his Practicae medicinae (Paris, 1633), though we've been unable to confirm whether or not it was included in the first edition. Some believe the Tragopodagra is an early imitation of Lucian, while others stand by the traditional attribution. ¶ Gout was easily among early modern Europe's most persistent medical conditions, and we're sure the present treatise, by "one of the most reputable physicians of his time" (Omodeo), is worthy of study. Sennert served multiple stints as dean of the medical faculty at the University of Wittenberg, was eventually elevated to university rector, and had the honor of serving as personal physician to the prince elector of Saxony. If remembered today, it's typically for his attempts at synthesis across the broad field of medicine—between traditional Galenism and contemporary alchemical Paracelsianism, for example, or between different strains of atomistic thought. He wrote a popular introduction to medicine, too, the Institutiones Medicinae, reprinted throughout Europe. ¶ For all this success, we are most captivated here by the inclusion of a comedic tragedy that personifies gout as a goddess, Lucian's Tragopodagra, a piece of imaginative literature appended to a work of serious medicine. Medical satire had become its own genre in the 16th century, especially "the medical mock encomium, in which a disease or undesirable symptom was personified and praised in order to instruct the readership in an entertaining manner to live a devout, moderate life" (Benedek). Syphilis was an easy target for similar literary treatment, though eclipsed by gout. Some of Europe's most esteemed humanists, Willibald Pirckheimer and Gerolamo Cardano among them, targeted the latter in their own writing, and Lucian's gouty play was the perfect model for the satirically inclined humanist. "Lucian's refined yet playful dialogues provided his admirers and imitators opportunity to lampoon their own or their friends' gout while displaying humanist credentials. Moreover gout, being neither infectious nor fatal, was well suited to the classical rhetorical exercise of the mock encomium" (Williams). Scholars typically trace the ancient roots of all such literature to Lucian's Tragopodagra and Ocypus—little surprise, given the second-century Greek writer is often called the father of satire. ¶ Early physicians were encouraged to read widely—poetry, history, everything befitting a properly socialized intellectual—and there's ample evidence that early writers on serious subjects plumbed imaginative literature for practical advice. Lucretius's De Rerum Natura was an obvious source of scientific ideas, and Virgil's Georgics were tapped for astronomical, meteorological, and agricultural insight. Lucian apparently was no exception. "Reference to Lucian by a medical man such as Sennertus provides interesting proof of the fame of the Greek writer's powers of accurate observation and vivid description" (Tomarken). ¶ Rare. WorldCat reports no copies in North America and we trace no copies in auction records.

PROVENANCE: With annotations by a well informed contemporary reader on more than two dozen pages, including a sprawling customized index of more than 250 lines. To the upper margin of p. 35, where the printed text offers recipes for treatments, our reader has added yet another—and one that starts with olive oil and cinnabar (ol. oliv. and minii), an unsettling reminder of mercury's once ubiquitous role in medical treatment. Additional recipes have been added to p. 37, 41, and 44, together clear reminders of the printed text's capacity to serve as a storehouse for related information gathered by early readers. Annotations on p. 18 and 21 appear concerned with wine's role in gout, and many others are bibliographic references betraying a reader well read in the field of medicine. On p. 27, for example, we likely have a citation for Werner Rolfinck's own work on gout, on p. 42 a citation for Martin Blochwitz's Anatomia Sambuci (Leipzig, 1631), and at the foot of p. 46 is a citation for another work by Sennert. These may suggest our reader was a medical professional. Given how high gout must have ranked on the list of complaints physicians encountered, and the extraordinary effort our reader put into rendering quick access to granular content, this would hardly be surprising. ¶ There is no better manifestation of that effort than our reader's handwritten index. Such customized indices are a common form of annotation, but this one stands out for its unusual sprawling character. While early readers typically crammed their index onto whatever blank leaves were available at back, or sometimes at front, here the index traverses the entire printed text, taking full advantage of whatever white space the printer left behind. A and B are on the title verso; C and D in the bottom half of p. 109, where Sennert's text ends, and just spilling onto the next page; E is below the errata; F through L occupies both sides of blank leaf O4; M appears beneath the end of Lucian's Greek original on p. 131, with N and P on the following page beneath the final lines of the Latin translation; additional P surrounds the colophon; and R through V uses both sides of blank leaf S2. While such index compilers typically availed themselves of fly-leaves for this purpose, our reader's choice to use only the printed text is unusual, and perhaps explained by a handful of index terms on the title page. Representing the end of the alphabet, and with page numbers much too high to refer to the present work, they must be the vestige of a similar index our reader compiled for a medical work once bound with ours. ¶ There's copious underlining throughout, much of it in green ink, and an early reader has corrected some errata by hand. Modern bookplate of Dr. A.G. Mugler on front paste-down.

CONDITION: Modern full parchment; title inked on the spine. Leaves O4 and S2 are blank. Tragopodagra with the original Greek and Latin translation on facing pages. ¶ Blank leaf O4 mostly split up the middle, following the inked line separating the annotator's two columns of index, blank S2 with a similar phenomenon, if less extensive; title leaf half split at the inner margin and with a 3 cm tear in the bottom edge (affecting imprint); several leaves a bit ragged at the fore-edge, title included, affecting some of the ms index on its recto; scattered soiling, and the leaves darkened with age; trimmed close, affecting some marginalia.

REFERENCES: USTC 2132293 and 2086712 (probably the same edition/issue simply using different styles of title transcription) ¶ Pietro Daniel Omodeo, "Daniel Sennert and the University of Padua: Circulation of Medical Knowledge and Scholas across the Confessional Divide in the Seventeenth Century," Collected Wisdom of the Early Modern Scholar (2023), p. 63 (cited above); Thomas G. Benedek, "The Influence of Ulrich von Hutten's Medical Descriptions and Metaphorical Use of Medicine," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66.3 (Fall 1992), p. 371 (cited above), 375 ("Gout rather than syphilis became the principal medical focus of these satires, presumably because of the greater apprehension the latter disease continued to cause"); Mikhail Bakhtin (Helene Iswolsky, tr.), Rabelais and His World (1984), p. 161 ("As to gout, it was widespread in grotesque realism; we find it as far back as Lucian"), 161n18 ("Ambivalent praise of a malady, especially of syphilis and gout, was common"); Annette H. Tomarken, The Smile of Truth: The French Satirical Eulogy and Its Antecedents (1990), p. 261n61 (cited above); Thomas G. Benedek, "The Gout of Desiderius Erasmus and Willibald Pirckheimer: Medical Autobiography and Its Literary Reflections," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 57.4 (Winter 1983), p. 532 ("probably written after the time of Lucian, but frequently attributed to him"); Megan K. Williams, "Immobile Ambassadors: Gout in Early Modern Diplomacy," The Sixteenth Century Journal 47.4 (Winter 2016), p. 944 (cited above); p. 489-490 (brief but useful contextual assessment of the play), 496-498 (good summary of some of the key action); Hannah Marcus, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (2020), p. 14 (“Physicians’ libraries were repositories of books, notes, and notes in books, which serve now to document the intellectual work of these early modern practitioners of medicine”), 21 (on early physicians' broad reading); Martin Korenjak, “Explaining Natural Science in Hexameters: Scientific Didactic Epic in the Early Modern Era,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 68.1 (Spring 2019), p. 145 (on the use of early scientific poetry); Heather Jackson, Marginalia (Yale, 2001), p. 25 (“Not scholars or ex-scholars only, but readers of all sorts similarly collected, in the front of their books, materials from other books that could be used as aids and reinforcements for the reading of the book at hand. Notes of this kind are not original, but they indicate by the principles of selection and by the trouble taken to preserve them the frame of mind that the reader considered appropriate in the approach to the work."), 37-38 (on handwritten indices: “The conventional practice is for readers to write down, as they come upon them (therefore normally in page order from beginning to end and not in the alphabetical order of the published index), the page reference and a word or two to indicate the subject of the passage noted. To an observant, informed, and dedicated later reader, these simple memoranda can be quite revealing. The total number of notes may be an indication of the degree of the earlier reader’s interest. The order of page references may reflect the order of reading—was the book read through, or dipped into?—and the number of readings. The selection of topics gives an impression of the kind of thing the reader was looking for, or arrested by.”)

Item #813