[On the notes of the Xinkan Huangdimingtangjiujing (see text for symbol) in the possession of the National Diet Library]

This paper analyzes the notes of Xinkan huangdimingtangjiujing which are in the possession of the National Diet Library, particularly referring to those notes which include "master said", or "master's theory". Some of those are found in the answers from Manase Dosan (see text for symbol) to Hata Soha (see text for symbol) collected in the Kotei meido kyukyo hushin shosho (see text for symbol) which is the record of the question and answer letters between Manase Dosan and Hata Soha. This research indicates that this volume has a close relation to the acupuncture research of Dosan's or Soha's school. And it indicates that the "master" in the Notes of Xinkan huangdimingtangjiujing refers to Dosan. Acupuncture research has been flourishing since the Edo era and has compiled a lot of volumes on acupuncture. This volume contains some pioneering pieces of this research done in the Azuchi Momoyama era by Dosan and Soha, and is a precious material, showing that some of the state of affairs of the research done in that age still remains today.

[The copy of De humani corporis fabrica of Andreas Vesalius of the municipal library of Reims]

The author presents a copy of the De humani corporis fabrica by Andreas Vesalius; this book is preserved in the department of rare books of the municipal Library in Reims. This copy is a first edition as the author gives positive proofs. This book results of a donation to the Minimes's congregation of Reims by Seigneur Guillaume Le Vergeur, Count of Saint Souplet and Baillif of Vermandois in the 17th century. Guillaume Le Vergeur has also given other precious books to the monastery's library and his name is inscribed on the register of obituaries and on the pediment of the Minimes' Church.

Illustrations from the Wellcome Library William Winstanley's pestilential poesies in "The Christians refuge: or heavenly antidotes against the plague in this time of generall contagion to which is added the charitable physician (1665)"

During the Great Plague of London (1665), William Winstanley veered from his better known roles as arbiter of success and failure in his works of biography or as a comic author under the pseudonym Poor Robin, and instead engaged with his reading audience as a plague writer in the rare book The Christians Refuge: Or Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague in this Time of Generall Contagion to Which is Added the Charitable Physician (1665). From its extensive paratexts, including a table of mortality statistics and woodcut of king death, to its temporal and providential interpretation of the disease between the covers of a single text, The Christians Refuge is a compendium of contemporary understanding of plague. This article addresses The Christians Refuge as an expression of London's print marketplace in a moment of transformation precipitated by the epidemic. The author considers the paratextual elements in The Christians Refuge that engage with the presiding norms in plague writing and publishing in 1665 and also explores how Winstanley's authorship is expressed in the work. Winstanley has long been seen as a biographer or as a humour writer; attributing The Christians Refuge extends and challenges previous perceptions of his work.

[About some medical bibliographical sources of Jacobinic and Napoleonic age]

The authors analyze some bibliographical sources of jacobinic and Napoleonic age: books and pamphlets published by Stamperia Italiana e Francese in Milan (Lombardy); the Bullettino del Consiglio Subalpino di SanitY, ossia Giornale Fisico-Medico del Piemonte in Turin (Piedmont); some Charles Botta (1766-1837) books (Storia naturale e medica dell 'isola di Corfù; Mémoire du [...] sur la doctrine de Brown; Vicissitudes de l'instruction publique en Piémont depuis l'an VII jusq'au mois de ventose an XI [...]). They are useful to analyse the spreading of John Brown (1735-1788) theories in Italy, during the jacobinic and napoleonic time.

Byzantine medical manuscripts: towards a new catalogue, with a specimen for an annotated checklist of manuscripts based on an index of Diels' Catalogue

Greek manuscripts containing medical texts were inventoried at the beginning of the 20th century by a team of philologists under the direction of Hermann Diels. The resulting catalogue, however useful it was when new and still is today, needs to be updated not only because some manuscripts have been destroyed, certain collections and single items have changed location, new shelfmark systems have been sometimes adopted and cataloguing has made substantial progress, but also because in Diels' time the concept of ancient medicine was limited, the method used in compiling data was not standardized and, in a time of manual recording and handling of information, mistakes could not be avoided. The present article is an introduction to a new catalogue of Greek medical manuscripts. In the first part, it surveys the history of the heuristic and cataloguing of Greek medical manuscripts from the 16th century forward; in the second part, it highlights the problems in Diels' catalogue and describes the genesis and methods of the new catalogue, together with the plan for its completion; and in the third part, it provides a sample of such a new catalogue, with a list of the Greek medical manuscripts in the libraries of the United Kingdom and Ireland.

'For the benefit of the people': the Dutch translation of the Fasciculus medicinae, Antwerp 1512

The article deals with the Dutch translation of the Fasciculus medicinae based on the Latin edition, Venice 1495, with the famous woodcuts created in 1494 for the Italian translation of the original Latin edition of 1491. The woodcuts are compared with the Venetian model. New features in the Antwerp edition include the Skeleton and the Zodiac Man, bot originally based on German models. The text also deals with other woodcuts in the Low Countries based on these Venetian illustrations. The Appendices provide a short title catalog of all the editions and translations based on the Venetian edition and a stemma.

Rare book library catalogs with significant eye and vision content

Rare book library catalogs can serve as useful historical reference works. This paper discusses the content and format of seven rare book library catalogs with significant information relating to the eye and vision. The catalogs examined are held in the libraries on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University.

[Textual research on the modern circulation of Zhong jing quan shu (Zhongjing's Complete Works) block-printed edition in the Ming dynasty and collected in the library of China Medical University in modern times]

The edition of Zhong jing quan shu (Zhongjing's Complete Works) recorded in the China Bibliography of Medical Books is different from the one in the Supplement to China Bibliography of Medical Books. The version of Zhong jing quan shu collected in the library of China Medical University is the Zhao Kai-mei's version of the Ming dynasty, printed after the Song version in Supplement to China Bibliography of Medical Books. This book was formally collected by the Manchuria Medical University on 8 November, 1936 (the 10th years of Japanese Showa). In 1945, Manchuria Medical University was taken over by the government of Kuomintang, and changed its name to National Shenyang Medical College. The Ministry of Public Health of Northeast People's government took over it in 1948, and merged into the China Medical University in June, 1949 together with its numerous rare ancient TCM books. All of them were borrowed by Liaoning College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in 1964. In March and April of 1970, these books were carried to Liaoyang, and then, to Shenyang in October. In 1978, the ancient books were retrieved by the China Medical University. Thus, the Zhao Kaimei's version of Ming dynasty of Zhongjing quan shu is preserved until today.

[Women, bodies, and Hebrew medieval medical literature]

This essay explores different views on the female body articulated within Hebrew medieval texts on women's health care. It also investigates whether texts also integrate women's own perceptions of their bodies, and of their needs and care. I have analysed how this genre of Hebrew literature understood two key issues in the construction of sexed bodies: menstruation and cosmetics.

[The Paduan doctor Alessandro Pellati, his library and the first edition of De medicorum astrologia]

The article prints the text of a document in the Archivio di Stato, Venice, comprising a list of books intended for auction, with an estimate of their value. THey constitute the private library of Alessandro Pellati (d. 1487), a Paduan doctor about whom nothing is known, except his name appears in the colophon of the first edition of a short treatise attributed to Hippocrates, the De medicorum astrologia seu de esse aegrorum, translated into Latin and published in Padua in 1483. The considerable number of astrological works in his library show that Pellati was keenly interested in the subject which, under the title of "natural magic", had assumed a significant place in medical studies at that time, particularly in Padua.

Exposure to carcinogens and mortality in a cohort of restoration workers of water-damaged library materials following the River Arno flooding in Florence, 4 November 1966

BACKGROUND

In Florence, Italy, the Arno River overflowed on 4 November 1966 and the rare library collections of the National Central Library in Florence (FNCL) were flooded. A Restoration Centre was immediately set up. For book restoration many toxic chemicals were used, such as chlorinated solvents, ethylene oxide (EtO), formaldehyde, petroleum distillates, and pesticides. The study's aims were: (I) to document the restoration process, (II) to identify the potential chemical exposures, (III) to evaluate the mortality experience of restorers.

METHODS

A small cohort of 168 workers was identified. The restorers were employed in the FNCL's Restoration Centre during the years 1967-1976. We excluded 9 subjects from the analysis because no working period data were available. Mortality from all causes, from all cancers, and from cancers of specific sites was compared with that of the Italian general population. Standardized Mortality Rates (SMRs) and their 95% confidence intervals were estimated.

RESULTS

Restorers were exposed to relatively low levels of several carcinogens. A non-significant excess of cancer mortality was found. Significant increases in brain neoplasm among men and in uterine cancer among women were found,

CONCLUSIONS

The small cohort size hampers interpretation of the results. Larger epidemiology studies on library material restorers are needed in order to evaluate risks in this activity. Recommendations to improve future studies are given.

[Addenda to the list of manuscripts of the Circa Instans preserved in British libraries]

In the present article I offer a list of the Latin and Middle English exemplars of the Liber de simplici medicina known to be preserved in the British Libraries. In a previous essay, I supplied an initial list of manuscripts, which is here updated with further texts identified as versions of this work attributed to the Salernitan physician Matthaeus Platearius.

Ambrosius Holbein's memento mori map for Sir Thomas More's Utopia. The meanings of a masterpiece of early sixteenth century graphic art

This paper describes how, and asks why, the Renaissance artist Ambrosius Holbein hid a skull within the overall design of his woodcut map of Sir Thomas More's Utopia. (Fig. 2) This map was prepared for the 1518 Froben edition of the book, and was probably commissioned by Erasmus of Rotterdam. Its identification now is made easier by the habits of interpretation with which all dentists are equipped thanks to their skill in dental radiology, and by the recognition of teeth appearing in an unlikely disguise.

Selling the silver: country house libraries and the history of science

Country houses have long acted as scholarly research centres, and the contents and organization of their libraries reveal how knowledge was created and transmitted through scientific networks: they provide material evidence of intellectual and social cultures. Manuscripts are particularly appreciated in this regard because they are unique, but individual books also differ and copies of the same book are not always identical -- they might be annotated by authors and readers, and the printed text can vary as well -- so they also carry invaluable historical information. When libraries are broken up, access to the past is permanently blocked.

[Galenus Latinus, 1490-1533]

This article provides an examination of the Latin complete editions of Galen, from 1490 to 1528, which are not all pointed out and described by Richard Durling in his census published in 1961, in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. They present the first large circulation of Galen in the Renassaince, which was in Latin, not in Greek, as well as the constitution of the Galenic corpus. At first it was formed by Medieval translations. The humanistic translations, often of the same known texts, were printed from the edition by Pietro Antonio Rustico in 1515-16; they occupy a separate volume in both the editions of 1528, and the two supplementary volumes of the Giuntine of 1528, printed in 1531 and 1533.

[Ebers Papyrus. The book of medical knowledge of the 16th century B.C. Egyptians]

In 2nd century B.C. Clemens Alexanrinus was sure, that the Egyptians collected all their knowledge in 42 secret books. of which last six contained medical knowledge. Despite this and records of other ancient authors, for long time the opinion about the history of medicine was not changed. In traditional view the role of Hippocrates and the Greeks was emphasized. In 19th century egyptologist began finding Egyptian papyri, whose contents concerned medical matters. The first medical papyrus was published by Georg Ebers in 1875. The Ebers Papyrus is a scroll 20,23 meters in length and contains 108 columns of text. I is dated at the reign of Amenophis I (1536 B.C.). This papyrus was published and translated by different researches (the most valuable is German edition Grundriss de Medizin de alten ägypter, and based on this Paul Ghalioungui edition). In the opinion of Grundriss, chaotic arrangement of medical advices in papyrus suggest different originals from which they drew. The text of The Ebers Papyrus is ordered in series of prescriptions, which are grouped according to different diseases, illnesses and injuries. ALmost all of those groups have introduction by the formula: "Here begins.." used on 36 occasions. They are, however, often varied and disorganised. The owner of this papyrus was probably a physician - the text mentions about "physician secrets". Herodotus writes, that Egyptian physicians were specialized, which seems to be confirmed by The Ebers Papyrus.

[The history of Biblioteca de Manguinhos and its rare collections]

This article narrates the creation of Fundação Oswaldo Cruz Biblioteca de Manguinhos Library) and its rare collections of books, magazines, journals, brochures, leaflets and theses, important publications on the history of biological sciences and health from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It also describes the rich original ornaments and decoration of the library room and its furniture. It recovers the history of the library these past hundred years, which is closely associated to the history of Fundação Oswaldo Cruz.

[Review on fragmentary volume of original block - printed edition of Nan jing ben yi (Gist of the Classic of Questioning)]

Nan jing ben yi (Gist of the Classic of Questioning) was written by Hua Shou of the Yuan dynasty. The extant first volume of the original block - printed edition, revised by Lü Fu, was collected in the Library of China Academy of Military Medical Science. There is a preface written by Jie Hong, a Director Ministry of Techndogy in 1366 at the front of this volume. The red seal in the first page showed that it had been collected by Yun Xiang, Pan Zuyin et al. It is highly possible that this volume is the only existing copy.