We recently rehoused the Henry E. Sigerist Medieval Manuscript Reproduction Collection, moving its contents from their original folders into updated storage and creating a finding aid.
This collection provides fascinating insight into medical historian and previous director of the Institute Henry E. Sigerist, and his research for his third volume in his unfinished eight volume series, A History of Medicine. Though the third volume was never published, the collection documents its intended scope, the middle ages, and showcases Sigerist’s interest in medical illustration, medieval paleography in Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, and the photostat – an interesting early reproduction technology that enabled Sigerist to produce his copies.
Sigerist’s notes indicate his organizational methods and research areas for his third A History of Medicine volume.
Sigerist travelled and copied the manuscripts in the 1930s-1950s, resulting in partial copies of a couple of manuscripts that have since been lost to the destruction of World War II. One is the Codex medicus Hertensis, a manuscript herbal from the collection of the Herten Bibliothek des Grafen Nesselrode-Reichenstein – view our blog post on this codex here.
The other is Codex F.V.25 from Turin’s Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino; Sigerist copied thirty-three of the lost manuscript’s pages, folios 259v-275v. In 1902, entomologist Pierro Giacosa recorded the manuscript as having 285 leaves total and including remedies for various illnesses or conditions mostly related to medicine, such as a treatise on urine and one on dangerous days to bleed. The section photocopied by Sigerist in our collection cites the work of Johannes Alexandrinus, Galen, Aristotle, and Boethius on the plague – demonstrating the medical traditions and knowledge available to its author in fourteenth century Italy. Giacosa describes illustrations throughout the lost manuscript and with Sigerist’s copy, we can see one such illustrated page including birds, flowers, and plant motifs pictured below. We have provided a PDF copy of the Turin F.V.25 below, and for higher resolution TIFF files, please contact historicalcollection@jhmi.edu.
Medical illustrations feature throughout the collection, such as the sphere of life and death, a device used to predict medical outcomes and thereby treat patients; Sigerist’s interest in the sphere resulted in an article published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine in 1942 (pictured below in Vercelli’s Biblioteca Captiolare C.4, XXVII).
The Sphere of Life and Death, pictured in Vercelli’s Biblioteca Captiolare C.4, XXVII, f. 143r.
An illustration from Florence’s Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Pl. 74.30, fol. 23v.
In particular, Sigerist produced copies of illustrations from Florence’s Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana manuscripts, often excluding the surrounding context and information. One such illustration shown below depicts a snake bite in action, copied from Pl. 73.16, fol. 64r, while another from Pl. 73.41 fol, 125r depicts a patient undergoing a dental procedure.
The Sigerist collection also showcases the implications of photostat technology on reprography and research. In terms of access, photostats were a transformative technology for researchers and libraries in the early twentieth century, and they also literally transformed the information content or material characteristics of the manuscript.
This could be less than desirable; in Turin F.V.25 p. 266b, the manuscript’s legibility is severely impacted by the unfocused photostat. Textual engagement in the form of annotations, reader marks, and the physical shape and character of the paper is preserved in varying degrees across the collection, and inverted white-on-black photostats can throw stains and damages into stark relief. While one library may reproduce the entirety of the page, another severely crops out everything but the text of interest to the researcher. Hannah Alpert Abram’s fascinating research into photostat technology highlights the impacts of the underlying labor structure supporting library photostat reproduction; transcribing a Greek manuscript manually requires a decidedly different skill set than operating a photostat camera.
The collection was rehoused by intern Lauren White. For more information about the Sigerist collection, visit the Institute or contact us. For further reading, see our finding aid or our works cited below.
Works Cited
Alpert-Abrams, Hannah. 2023. “An Unexpected Influence: Photostats in Special Collections Libraries.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 117 (3): 311–37. https://doi.org/10.1086/726468.
Giacosa, Pierro. Magistri salernitani nondum editi. Catalogo ragionato della Esposizione di storia della medicina aperta in Torino nel 1898. Fratelli Bocca, 1901.
Sigerist, Henry E. “‘The Sphere of Life and Death’ in Early Mediaeval Manuscripts.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 11, no. 3 (1942): 292–303. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44442761.
Temkin, Owsei. “Studies on late Alexandrian Medicine: I. Alexandrian Commentaries on Galen’s ‘De Sectis Ad Introducendos.’” Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 3, no. 6 (1935): 405–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44438117.