Above image: Leipzig, Germany: medical historians: group portrait. Photograph, 1929. Wellcome Collection.

In July of 1917, Karl Sudhoff published an article in his Archiv Für Geschichte der Medizin entitled, “Codex medicus Hertensis (Nr. 192)”, describing a manuscript herbal in the collection of the Herten Bibliothek des Grafen Nesselrode-Reichenstein.

With permission of the owner, Sudhoff was able to photograph the original document and include reproductions of select pages in his article.  Both the original and Sudhoff’s copy were lost by the end of the second world war. Thanks to Sudhoff’s protégé and future director of the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, Henry E. Sigerist, a third, partial copy of the manuscript is held at the Historical Collection. This copy was likely made from Sudhoff’s photographs. The document lives within The Henry E. Sigerist Medieval Manuscript Reproduction Collection. This collection contains nearly 150 manuscripts from 40 European libraries visited by Siegrist from the 1930-1950s. A finding aid for this collection will be available within the coming weeks. We will post about it here.

The Codex medicus Hertensis is not the only reproduction of the Sigerist collection lost to the war. The collection also contains some of Codex Turin F.V.25 of the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino.

We have provided a PDF copy of the Codex medicus Hertensis below. For higher resolution TIFF files, please contact historicalcollection@jhmi.edu.

Further reading:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20773165?seq=1

https://handschriftencensus.de/25597