Avi Ohry
Tel Aviv, Israel

Israel Spach (Israele Spachio, Spachius) (1569–1610), was raised and studied in Strasbourg and later in Paris under Jean Riolan the Elder.¹ He finished his medical studies at the University of Tübingen under Andreas Planer in 1581.² In 1589 he returned to Strasbourg, where he married³ and lived until his death. The first name Israel does not indicate a Jewish origin, for it was a common name for Christians in Alsace at that time.

In 1598 Spach published Nomenclator scriptorum philosophicorum atque philologicorum in Strassburg.⁴ Covering the works of over 4,000 authors arranged under 400 subject headings, it emphasized the biographies of contemporary writers. It was the most significant subject bibliography of the sixteenth century and became a model for subsequent subject bibliographies. It included “esoteric” subjects such as “gladiatorial combat, glory, and sobriety.”

Israel Spach, together with Swiss scholar-librarian-publisher Frisius (Hans Jakob Fries, 1546–1611) and pastor-bibliographer Paulus Bolduanus (Bolduan, 1563? – 1622?), are regarded as the most prominent leading German speaking bibliographers during the Renaissance.⁵ Spach was cited by Gabriel Naudé (1600–53), a French scholar, librarian, polymath and physician, considered the first important theoretician of modern library organization. Spach’s philosophical contributions are found in a book by Michael Jasenas.⁴

In 1597 Spach published with others a compendium on women’s medicine, a gynecological textbook.⁶ This was used until the 19th century. It mentions the story of the Lithopedion of Sens. As recorded by Mistaking Histories:

When Colombe Chatry, a tailor’s wife, died in May 1582 at the age of 68, at her husband’s request her body was opened up to discover what had happened to a pregnancy she had started 28 years earlier, which had never come to anything but had left her with years of abdominal pain and loss of appetite. A petrified female fetus was discovered, and was first described by one of those who saw it immediately after its discovery, the physician Albosius (Jean d’Ailleboust).⁷

The dissection by physicians Claude le Noir and Jehan Couttas found the following:⁸

They cut through the stomach and peritoneum, and viewed the prodigious growth, which was wrinkled and formed like a turkey’s crest. It was hard and brittle like a shell, and covered with what seemed like scales. The surgeons ‘plunged their razors into it’, but without being able to penetrate the hard shell. After wearing out the edge of their knives on the hard tumor, they fetched mauls and a drill, and finally succeeded to break it. They felt the head and right shoulder of the lithopaedion, but it was not until they had broken off a large portion of the covering shell, and seen the wonderful sight inside, that they understood what they were dealing with.

Hughes writes:⁹

After smashing the calcified covering apart, which infuriated d’Ailleboust as it would then be “impossible to study closer the anatomy of the calcified shell and the nourishing vessels”, it was possible to see the shape and features of the foetus contained therein.

And Mistaking Histories adds:⁷

Illustrations of the lithopedion sometimes included a Latin epigram linking it to the ancient Greek myth of the flood, in which the two survivors, Deucalion and Pyrrha, repopulated the world by walking over the earth and throwing stones behind them, which were transformed into living beings. This epigram may be translated as: “Deucalion cast stones behind him and thus fashioned our tender race from the hard marble. How comes it that nowadays, by a reversal of things, the tender body of a little babe has limbs more akin to stone?’ While the stones thrown by Deucalion softened to become mortal, the lithopedion had hardened from flesh to stone; contemporary medical writers explained this by suggesting that the cause of the phenomenon was the coldness of the womb.”

End notes

1. Jean Riolan the Elder (1539–1605) was a noted French anatomist and a leading member of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. He fought against Paracelsus’ beliefs that were embraced by the faculty. His work, Apologia Philosophica et Christiana, pro Animi libertate, ‎attacked the theories on the soul of Pomponazzi, Portius, Sepulveda, and Cardano.
2. Andreas Planer (Athesinus) (1546–1606) was a German physician and philosopher, professor of logic, metaphysics, and medicine in Strasbourg and Tübingen and rector in Tübingen.
3. “Israel Spach.” Wikipedia. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Spach
4. Michael Jasenas. A History of the Bibliography of Philosophy. Georg Olms, 1973.
5. Bernard Breslauer and Roland Folter. Bibliography: Its History and Development. NY: The Grolier Club, 1984.
6. Caspar Bauhi, Israel Spach & Martin Akakia. Gynaeciorum sive de mulierum tum communibus, tum gravidarum, parientium, et puerperarum affectibus & morbis. Argentinae, Sumptibus Lazari Zetzneri, 1597. Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/qjpqxzzx
7. Fluff35. “Stone Babies: The Lithopedion of Sens.” Mistaking Histories blog May 1, 2017. https://mistakinghistories.uk/2017/05/01/stone-babies-the-lithopedion-of-sens/
8. J Bondeson, “The earliest known case of a lithopaedion,” J R Soc Med Jan 1996;89(1):13-8, quoted in James Hughes, “The lithopedion,” James Edward Hughes, July 10, 2013. https://www.jamesedwardhughes.com/science-essays/the-lithopedion
9. James Hughes, “The lithopedion.”