Hippocrates. Omnia opera Hippocratis [Greek]. (Venice: Heirs of Aldo Manuzio & ꦉAndrea Torresano, May 1526)

Editio princeps of the Hippocratic corpus, marking a substantial improvement on a Latin translation of Marco Fabio Calvo

published the previous year in Rome by Francesco Minizio Calvo, by repairing "a considerable number of accidental omissions and one long repetition that Calvus … made because he followed only one manuscript. Moreover, by presenting the original text, it laid the necessary foundation for all further philological and medical study of the corpus” (Grolier/Medicine). Quite uncommon on the market.

"The mid-1520s brought an uncharacteristic spate of medical works from the Aldine Press, especially the five-volume folio Galen of 1525. The Heirs of Aldus then published this editio princeps of the Hippocratic corpus, a collection of medical treatises assembled in the third century BCE and traditionally attributed to Hippocrates. Gian Francesco Torresani based this edition on a comparison of two manuscripts, which survive in the Bibliothèque nationale de France [MS gr. 2141] and the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice [MS gr. 269]" (Grolier/Aldus). The works collected here—fifty-nine, including some not printed in the Latin first edition—represent texts from both the library of the Hippocratic school of medicine associated with the healing shrine of the god Asclepius on Kos and from the school of Knidus; some were almost certainly written by Hippocrates himself. The wide range of topics covered include, in addition to the Hippocratic Oath, diet and regimen, anatomy, surgery, embryology, obstetrics, epidemiology, cardiology, p𓃲harmacology, ulcers, and hemorrhoids.

"The personal originality of Hippocrates is elusive. … In order to account for Hippocrates' importance, one must take into consideration his prestige as a teacher, his talent as a practitioner, and his authorship of a number of treatises—which are, incidenta🎃lly, a great deal more engaging than the rather monotonous writings of the Cnidians, and must have attracted a

wider readership by their style and topicality. It is clear that Hippocrates did not stand alone as a genius in an intellectual desert; it is equally clear that, for reasons that we do not know precisely, he was in the front rank of the medicine of his age, as the primus inter pares. … [I]f he is not all of medicine, and if we do not even know with certainty exactly what he wrote, we should nevertheless consider him to be the eminent representative of a significant stage of medicine—the stage in which war was waged on all magico-religious medical practice, and in which medicine consciously sought to become fully scientific and at least succeeded in becoming partially rational. To go further in one's praise is to fall back into hagiography, but we must note the difficulty and enormousness of the task that the Hippocratics assumed. The proof of their success may be found in that for two millennia no better work was accomplished, and often worse was done" (Robert Joly, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography).

Folio (306 x 202 mm). Greek and roman types, 54 lines plus headline. collation: *⁶ A-Z⁸ AA-EE⁸ FF¹⁰: 240 leaves. Woodcut Aldine device on title-page (with a warning to counterfeiters) and FF10v, 3- to 10-line initial spaces with guide-letters. (Some residual staining and repair, m𒆙ostly marginal, scattered throughout, evidently from cleaning of dampstaining, often very minor, this is most severe on O2, X8, and quire CC, which has text affected and supplied in pen facsimile to first few leaves, title-page with short marginal tear, pinhole wormhole at top margin, and filled small wormhole at lower margin.)

binding: Early Italian limp vellum (308 x 215 mm), slig🍸htly overlapping fore-edges, plain endpapers and edges. (Some light soiling and foxing, spine repaired at head, resewn)

provenance: Unidentified owner, inscription, "Julii Tiscavnae Julii Laurviensis" (?), on title-page. acquisition: Purchased from Il Cartiglio, Turin, 1998. references: UCLA 237; Adams H563; Cataldi Palau 100; Durling (NLM) 2316; Edit16 22512; Grolier/Aldus 77 (this copy); Grolier/Medicine 1B; Renouard 102/1; USTC 835751; Wellcome 3173🌞; Richard J. Durling, Catalogue of sixteenth century printed books in the National Library of Medicine (Bethesda: 1967), 2316