Tractatus de Oculis, a treatise on eye medicine, in Latin, manuscript on paper

Estimate

1,500 - 2,000 GBP

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Description

14 leaves, 215mm. by 145mm., lacking text at end, else presumably complete, mostly c.30-35 lines, written in dark brown ink in a gothic bookhand, some flourished capitals, a few marginal stains, one or two tears repaired without affecting text, first leaf a bit dark, nineteenth-century red and yellow mottled boards

Catalogue Note

This is a detailed and practical treatise on opthamology. It opens, “A maiori claritate & similitudine lumen corpori ministret …” and, assuming these are indeed the opening words of the treatise, which makes grammatical sense, the text is apparently unrecorded and may be unique. It is very close to, and perhaps derived from, the twelfth-century textbook of Beneventus Grassus of Jerusalem, De oculis eorumque egritudinis et curis, printed in Ferrara in 1474, and translated into English by C.A. Wood, 1929. Like Grassus, the present author cites Constantinus Africanus and the ninth-century physician, Johannitus. The author begins by describing eyes with their various ‘tunics’, or colours, which some writers divide into seven but which the writer here, like Grassus again, simplifies into two. He discusses the humours which make up eyes (fol.3v), cataracts (fol.4r) and their treatment, opthalmia, or cloudiness of eyes (fol.5v), and the four different types of paniculus, or eye deposits (fol.11v). Each section is accompanied by detailed recipes for mixing eye medicines.

Medieval texts of practical medicine and pharmacology are rare.