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Ketham, Johannes de. Fasiculo de medicina. (Venice: Zuane & Gregorio di Gregorii, 1494).

Johannes de Ketham was a German physician living in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. Little is known about him, but he has been identified by many as a physician practicing in Vienna in 1460 named Johannes von Kirchheim.

Fasiculo de medicina is a translation into Italian by Sebastiano Manilio of Ketham's monumental Fasciculus medicinae, which was first published in Venice in 1491. Fasciculus medicinae was the first printed book to contain anatomical illustrations. The Italian translation contains illustrations made from new woodcuts which are superior in quality than the older, Latin edition, as well as some new illustrations and new text. The text itself is actually a collection of short medical treatises edited by Ketham, many of which are from the medieval period.

Further reading

Choulant, L. History and bibliography of anatomic illustration. Trans. and annotated by Mortimer Frank. (New York: Hafner, 1962). Pp. 115-119.

Ketham, J. de. The Fasciculus Medicinae of Johannes de Ketham, Alemanus : facsimile of the first (Venetian) edition of 1491. With English translation by Luke Demaitre ; commentary by Karl Sudhoff ; trans. and adapted by Charles Singer. (Birmingham, Ala.: The Classics of Medicine Library, 1988).

Morton’s Medical Bibliography (Garrison and Morton). Ed. By Jeremy Norman. Fifth ed. (Aldershot, Hants, England : Scolar Press ; Brookfield, Vt., USA : Gower Pub. Co., 1991). No. 363.1.

Plates

Page 1 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina, featuring Petrus de Montagnana and his library. The frontispiece features the commentator, translator, and philologist Petrus de Montagnana. He is portrayed as a prototypical Humanist, a man of books, rather than as a physician. The books in his surroundings are medical and include a dozen captioned volumes calling forth the physician’s great authorities. Below Petrus de Montagnana are a sick male and female patient awaiting treatment.

Page [1].

Page 2 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina, featuring a senior doctor who, in full academic garb with the professor’s distinctive hat, toga, and stole, points at a flask in a gesture of understanding and teaching, instructing the four junior colleagues accompanying him what 'signs' or diagnosis he reads in the urine, as in 'Grand Rounds.'

Page [2].

Page 3 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina features a diagnostic uroscopy chart. The chart identifies the differences in urine by color, contents, and consistency. The focus is on colors, each of which is represented by a matula or flask. The color of urine also reflected the predominance of one of the four humors in the examined person; this predominance determined one’s 'temperament' as (clockwise, from top left) sanguine, choleric, melancholic, or phlegmatic.

Page [3].

Page 4 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina dealing with urine. At the bottom right corner of the page is the NLM stamp.

Page [4].

Page 7 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina featuring the disease man. This drawing serves as a diagram of the diseases that affect different parts of the body and is a famous example of Renaissance anatomical realism. Four columns on either side of the figure list diseases alphabetically, generally without relation to logic or pathology. Some diseases, on the other hand, are recognized as local: these are listed from head to toe, from quinsy of the throat and bad fingernails, to gout in the feet; in between, we see 'running of the chest,' arthritis in the arms, 'passion' of the heart, cramps in the legs, and, most strikingly, cancer of the testicles.

Page [7].

Page 15 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina, featuring zodiac man, a human figure with the parts of the body identified with signs of the zodiac.

Page [15].

Page 16 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina, featuring bloodletting man, detailing a map of the veins to be incised for bloodletting.

Page [16].

Page 24 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina, featuring wound man, detailing wounds from swords, daggers, and arrows, and blows from rocks and clubs, as well as knife wounds from domestic and occupational accidents.

Page [24].

Page 37 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina. Page 8 are six illustrations of the parts of the ear. Page 9 are four illustrations of the parts of the nose.

Page [37].

Page 51 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina, featuring a visit to a plague victim. The image shows a plague victim who, judging from his face, is in bad shape but, judging from the setting, rather privileged. A physician is visiting the patient at home. He is taking the pulse, while holding to his nose a sponge soaked with wine vinegar. Three women are attending to the patient, and two men are standing next to the physician; a cat sits on the floor in lower right corner.

Page [51].

Page 64 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina, featuring the dissection of a cadaver. This is the first realistic depiction of an anatomy lecture held at a university, namely in an academic hall at the University of Padua. In the chair, a relatively junior doctor, the lector, is set to recite from Mondino’s Anathomia. Behind the table, to the right, a senior doctor begins to point, in his role of demonstrator or ostensor. The basket in front will collect all the parts, to be carefully reunited with the corpse for burial.

Page [64].

Where this page came from

This page was imported from National Library of Medicine. From the National Library of Medicine's Historical Anatomies on the Web; the essay is a work of the United States government and the plates, photographed by the library from books centuries old, are in the public domain.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.

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Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nlm.nih.gov

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