Christopher Duffin
London, England

The Hortus Sanitatis was published in Mainz (western central Germany) on June 23, 1491 by Jacob Meydenbach (fl. fifteenth century).¹ In the forty years or so since Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1393–1406–1468) first invented printing using movable type, the industry had undergone many modifications. The possibilities and advantages of the new publication medium over traditional handwritten manuscript preparation were beginning to become firmly established in normal practice: the inclusion of a title page, experimentation with different fonts, page sizes, text layout, the inclusion of illustrations integrated into the columns of text, and overlay printing using several colors all formed part of the early evolution of publishing. Multiple print copies could be produced more quickly, easily, and cheaply, and were of uniform quality. In some ways, the Hortus represented best contemporary practice. The folio volume is substantial, consisting of 454 unnumbered leaves. The Latin text is arranged in two columns, and the illustrations are fully integrated into the text block.

The Hortus is effectively the earliest printed encyclopedia of natural history. Precursors of the volume, also printed in Mainz but by Gutenberg’s former apprentice, Peter Schöffer (c. 1425–1503), were limited to the description of plants.² Meydenbach’s book had an extensive botanical section, but also added exhaustive segments on terrestrial animals, fish, birds, and rocks. An appendix considers the diagnostic properties of urine. The English translation of the Latin title reveals its focus—The Garden of Health; this volume concerned itself with the medicinal virtues believed to reside in the enormous breadth of the natural world. This was an era when it was believed that God had invested nature with all the medicines mankind needed. In earlier centuries, a specially qualified magus was needed to interpret the various signs with which God had equipped plants, animals, and stones to elucidate their potential therapeutic applications. The Hortus was partly responsible for making this “secret” knowledge available to an audience that was larger, more geographically widespread, and inclusive of a less socially stratified readership; so long as a person could read Latin and had access to a copy of the book, the accumulated medical wisdom of centuries was at their fingertips.

The volume is arranged into a series of named sections: De Herbis has 530 chapters dealing with healing plants; De Animalibus covers terrestrial animals (sensu lato) in 164 chapters; De Avibus is concerned with birds and other airborne creatures in 122 chapters; aquatic animals are grouped together in 106 chapters forming De Piscibus; De Lapidibus has 144 chapters on (mostly) geological materials like precious and semi-precious stones, rocks, and minerals. Each section opens with a full-page woodcut introducing the reader to the group under consideration. For De Herbis, the woodcut shows a group of savants sitting in a garden (Fig. 1A); De Animalibus, De Avibus, and De Piscibus illustrate a selection of the appropriate animals being actively discussed by learned men (Fig. 1B, C, 2A). De Lapidibus depicts groups and individual potential customers moving through a covered market housing specimen display tables (Fig. 2B). In some ways it is the late medieval equivalent of the Tucson Rock and Mineral Show; the vendors are clearly presenting their stock of specimens for examination, trying to attract the attention of potential purchasers and negotiating over price.

The chapters are numbered and arranged alphabetically. Each opens with a woodcut, often rather stylized, depicting the species in question. The information following the chapter title and number may then include alternative names for the subject, followed by a description, perhaps including the origins and general medicinal qualities of the item. Then follows a section entitled Operationes, which collates the contemporary therapeutic applications of the object, drawing heavily on duly acknowledged historical authorities. Depending on the segment, these include luminaries such as Theophrastus, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Aesculapius, Pliny the Elder, Dioscorides, Solinus, Isidore of Seville, Bartholomew the Englishman, Platearius, Albertus Magnus, Avicenna, Rhases, Serapion, Alfonso X, and Arnold of Saxony. This is interspersed with unattributed “vulgar” contemporary applications practiced in the folk medicine tradition. 

From the modern perspective, the taxonomy of the sections is not at all rigorous. In addition to plants, De Herbis contains information on a range of everyday products (vinegar, wine, butter, milk, honey, soap, wax, bread etc.), a few outliers (cochineal beetle and bitumen, for example) and some important religious entries (tree of everlasting life and manna). De Animalibus includes a range of arthropods (e.g. spiders, silkworm, crayfish, ants, locusts, bed bugs) as well as numerous mythical creatures (e.g. dragons, Leviathan, manticore, Pegasus, unicorn). De Piscibus also includes some distinctly non-piscine entries (e.g. snails and crocodiles). In the absence of specimens to draw from nature, the artist did the next best thing for some items; dolphins are represented as mermaids, for example, and sea horses as terrestrial horses with fish-like tails. The section on birds has likewise some anomalous entries, including Spanish flies, stag beetles, and mosquitoes, together with numerous mythical creatures (e.g. phoenix, gryphon, harpie). De Lapidibus also includes stones of legend (e.g. the dragon stone, eagle stone, lynx stone, stag’s tears, swallow stone, and the toad stone), plus various non-geological components (e.g. ashes, precious red coral, pearls, tartarus or algol—deposits building up on the inner walls of wine vats).

The Hortus enjoyed enormous popularity as a medical manual as measured by the large number of copies surviving in personal and institutional libraries and the number of printings that took place. The rules of copyright that exist today were unknown in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Original woodcut blocks could be borrowed, rented, or transferred between publishers. Alternatively, new images modeled on the originals could be commissioned, and the original text copied, perhaps for publication on lower-quality paper. At least four incunabular (i.e. published before 1501) editions are known and at least nine sixteenth-century versions. It was also translated from Latin into German and French, and an abridged edition was published in English. The French version published in Paris around 1500 by Antoine Vérard (fl. 1485–1512) is particularly distinctive with its highly embellished initials (Fig. 2C).³

The Hortus provides an interesting window into the contemporary state of medical and natural history knowledge at the end of the fifteenth century. Ambitious in scope, popular and well received, it represents an important milestone in the early publication history of original medical texts.

References

1. Anonymous. Hortus Sanitatis. Mainz: Jacob Meydenbach, 1491.
2. Johann Wonnecke von Kaub. Gart der Gesundheit. Mainz: Peter Schöffer, 1485.
3. Anonymous. Le Jardin de santé. Paris: Antoine Vérard, c. 1500.