How to Name Medieval Plants

Have you ever wondered how medieval Europeans produced their medicine without a universal botanical language? RBC’s new acquisition, a facsimile of the Tractus de herbis manuscript (Sloane MS. 4016 in the British Library), may just have the answer for you.

In the medieval and early modern period, medical professionals needed a way to record descriptions and drawings of the plants they used to make medicines. They kept this information in books called herbals. Herbals catalog the names and descriptions of plants, usually recording their medicinal value in addition to their culinary and magical properties.

An incunabular print of Pliny's Natural History translated into the Florentine dialect. The initial "D" is decorated with florals.
The “Prohemio”, or preface, of Pliny’s Historia naturalis translated into the Florentine dialect by Cristoforo Landino. Incunabula 373.4

Monasteries produced most of the extant herbals of the Middle Ages since religious institutions frequently had a physic garden and members of the various fraternal orders produced books and studied medicine to care for the sick and elderly. This practical training aside, medicinal manuscripts from this period often repeat the classical source materials monks would have been reading, such as Pliny’s Natural History or the works of Galen.

Following the crusades, however, medieval Europe began importing ideas from the medieval Islamic world.

Two soldiers, armed, guard Balsam of Mecca growing within the interior court of a castle.
Occasional animal, mineral, and human figures do make an appearance in the Tractus de herbis. Here, two soldiers guard the Balsam we see within the interior court (f. 10v). The inscription reads, “Balsam of Mecca, which in Arabic [is called] lelesem or fructex, which is more authentic” (translation by Alain Touwaide).
Muslim botanists and physicians, like Avicenna, made significant contributions to herbal knowledge, and the advent of print in the 15th century revolutionized and increased the production of and market for herbals. Some of the best-known herbals were produced during this time, though their manuscript counterparts continued to flourish even as the Protestant Reformation took medicine out of the monasteries and religious apothecaries and into the garden of the laity.

While many manuscripts of the Middle Ages prioritize the image, the Tractus de herbis is based solely on the image. The original manuscript, the British Library’s Sloane MS. 4016, is an herbal album from the 1440s that features more than 500 full-color illustrations of the raw materials — plants, minerals, and animals — used to make common medicines in the mid 15th century.

The page features front-facing images of Ammoniacum, Artamita, Pipevine, and Asafetida with brief commentary that expounds on their other common names, mostly in Arabic.
Because the diversity of languages often caused confusion, albums like the Tractus de herbis often included many of the different names associated with the same plant. Here, the entry for Asafetida (pictured on the bottom right of f. 7r) reads, “Avicenna calls it altit; Dioscorides calls it lassar and says it is the sap of a plant called silfer. He says it is [the plant called] anviden and bearan” (translation by Alain Touwaide).
Although Latin, Ancient Greek, and Arabic unified a portion of international medieval populations, many languages further complicated the already esoteric terms in medicinal literature. A panoply of scientific and traditional plant names prevented mutual understanding across the social hierarchy, so it became necessary to produce visual references that could help medieval medicine-makers differentiate between maleficent and beneficent herbs. The Tractus de herbis, like other visual herbals of the period, presents an illustration of the plant and accompanies that illustration with its various names, both ancient and contemporary.

The page features front-facing images of Horse Mint, Annual mercury, and Bugle with brief commentary that lists their other common names, mostly in Greek.
Depicted here are (left to right): Horse Mint, Annual mercury, and Bugle (f. 59v). The entry for Annual mercury is an excellent example of how the commentary will often feature plant names from authoritative sources alongside anonymously cited or commonplace terms. The description reads, “Constantin called [it] lichitus. As for Dioscorides, he [calls it] linçostis. Others [call it] parthenion, others parcenotidos, others algumus, others argiritus, others pastemon, others hermuli asilliom, others argilioces, others arumom, others alcancus, others argrarivus and others marcorela” (translation by Alain Touwaide).
In this way, Tractus de herbis personifies the unification of Medieval Europe’s past with its present, tying together classical knowledge, the new discoveries from the Arab world, and those pieces of original Ancient Greek and Roman medical literature that were once thought lost though actually preserved and reproduced by Muslim scholars.

The Rare Book Collection’s facsimile of Tractus de herbis is a replica of the British Library’s Sloane MS. 4016, and it features a companion volume of study by Alain Touwaide of the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions. The facsimile and companion volume are excellent resources for anyone interested in studying medieval herbalism or the history of global medical traditions.

Displaying the Body

The history of Western anatomy extends from ancient times to the modern analyses of bodily function; however, the scientific study of anatomy, particularly of the human body, is a recent historical phenomenon dating only so far back as the 2nd century.  During this time, the physician Galen compiled most of the writings from other ancient authorities and used empirical observation to develop theories of organ function.  He supplemented authoritative knowledge from classical sources by performing vivisections, mostly on animals, and applying those observations to human anatomy.  His work as a gladiatorial physician afforded him additional opportunities to study various wounds without the need to preserve and examine corpses, and these observations helped him expand his theories on organ function, the humors, and disease.  His tracts became the authoritative foundation for physicians for the next 1300 years.

Contrary to a popular misconception, the dismemberment of corpses wasn’t officially restricted during the Middle Ages and Renaissance; nevertheless, human dissection was rare in part because of local persecution and in part because physicians acquired their anatomical training from book-learning rather than practical observation.  But by the 14th century, some European universities began holding anatomical lectures.  Within 300 years, dissections became increasingly more common, and the modern field of anatomy as we know it today came into being.

With the advent of the printing press, print materials like books and pamphlets provided the means of recording and sharing the observations found in systemic dissections at major European universities.  Anatomists like Andreas Vesalius began to question relying solely on authoritative sources to draw anatomical and medical conclusions.  Vesalius openly denied Galen’s anatomical teachings and advanced the opinion that a new account of human anatomy was necessary.  By the end of the 1540s, his De humani corporis fabrica revolutionized anatomical study; however this work, though attractive, was not anatomically correct, and it required refinement from future anatomists.

A copperplate featuring a skinned nude. Individual muscles are assigned numbers and given labels on the adjacent page.
Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica is often credited as the foundation of modern anatomy. However, other contemporary texts are far more accurate in their prose accounts of the human body. Vesalius had the advantage of attractive, detailed copperplate illustrations, and his work quickly overshadowed these more studied accounts. In time, he would face his critics, such as Juan Valverde de Amusco. QS 4 V575 1543 superv’d.

Bartolomeo Eustachi, unlike Vesalius, was a noted supporter of Galen.  In addition to his rediscovery and accurate description of the tube that now bears his name in the internal ear, Eustachi was the first anatomist to accurately study the teeth and to describe the first and second dentition. He also discovered the adrenal glands.  However, it took many years for him to complete his intricate set of anatomical engravings.  By the time he finished them in 1552, Vesalius was already published. Eustachi would never see his own book printed in his lifetime.

A plate showing the base of the brain connected to the spinal column and its associated nerves.
Eustachi dissected with laborious care. He based his engravings on many autopsies, not just one or two. The plates function as general composites to portray the average human body in the most accurate way possible. This plate shows the base of the brain connected to the spinal column and its associated nerves. QS 4 E91 1722.

Eustachi’s student, Juan Valverde de Amusco, had an equally fraught relationship with Vesalius.  Valverde’s best-known work, Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano, was published in Rome in 1556, 13 years after Vesalius. Like Vesalius, Valverde criticized Galen, but he disagreed with several of Vesalius’s conclusions. Moreover, he blamed Vesalius and other Italian anatomists for failing to mitigate Spanish anatomists’ ignorance. In his Historia, Valverde asserts that the goal of the book is to aid Spanish surgeons whose minimal knowledge of Latin kept them unaware of the major anatomical reforms coming out of Italy in the mid-sixteenth century.

All but four of the 42 plates in Valverde’s book actually come directly from Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica.  This infuriated Vesalius, who bitterly accused Valverde of plagiarizing him and performing few if any dissections himself.  The inclusion of the plates also led many non-Spainards to believe Valverde had merely translated Vesalius’s work into Spanish.  However, Valverde refuted these claims.  In the introduction to his subsequent Italian translation, Valverde wrote:

Succeſſe dapoi, che molti non intendando la lingua Spagnuola, & vedendo le mie Figure non molto diuerſe da quelle, cominciarono á dire ch’io hauea tradotta l’historia del Veſſalio.

Many of those who did not understand the Spanish language, and who saw that my illustrations were not very different from his began to claim that I had just translated the work of Vesalius (translation by Bjørn Okholm Skaarup in Anatomy and Anatomists in Early Modern Spain).

A copperplate showing the exposed musculature of a skinned anatomy specimen. The figure holds a knife in his left hand and his own skin in his right.
One of Valverde’s original plates, the skinned figure is posed in a way to show its detailed musculature. Here the figure holds a knife in his left hand and his own skin in his right. Each muscle is meticulously cataloged in the adjacent prose. QS 4 V215a 1606.

Valverde longed to prove the inaccuracy of the accusations against him, including Vesalius’s, thereby validating his work as original.  Though it conversed with and pulled material from other books, Valverde corrected or complicated that material, always treating it as the building block to his own larger argument.  Throughout his own book, he corrects Vesalius’s images in nearly every account, improving on or adding details that he claims Vesalius grossly overlooked, most especially in the eyes, which he and other anatomists argue Vesalius universally mislabeled.

Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica, Bartolomeo Euctachi’s Tabulae anatomicae, and Juan Valverde de Amusco’s Anotomia del corpo umano will be on display in the Fearrington Reading Room at Wilson Special Collections Library as part of RBC’s Anatomy Day Open House.  Please join us from 12:00pm – 2:00pm on Tuesday, November 12, to view historical representations of human anatomy in selected materials from our collections. 

Recognizing Evil: The Devil and His Horns

“Angels are bright still,” Shakespeare writes, “though the brightest fell.”  This moment in Macbeth, when Malcolm debates with himself whether he should trust Macduff, maps Malcolm’s internal, political concerns onto a very real religious concern for Protestants in England: the outward appearance of evil.  Malcolm believes that even though evil constantly attempts to look good, good must always appear to be good, too.  Therein lies the problem:  how does one distinguish between what appears to be good, and what actually is?  How does one know whether they are working for something godly or for the Devil?

The western tradition still considers the figure of Satan as the multifarious and malevolent author of evil. In his seminal, multi-volume portrait of what the idea of “the Devil” evokes, Jeffrey Burton Russell suggests that the Devil isn’t a finite figure; instead, he argues,

The Devil is the personification of the principle of evil. Some religions have viewed him as a being independent of the good Lord, others as being created by him. Either way, the Devil is not a mere demon, a petty and limited spirit, but the sentient personification of the force of evil itself, willing and directing evil (Devil 23).

Nevertheless, across religious and secular traditions, the Devil remains a symbol of rebellion, heresy, accusation, and turpitude. Cultural representations of the Devil in literature and its accompanying visuals continue to define, condense, and even localize the measureless potential for evil.  The text and images in these books never stop attempting to confine the unconfinable.

Who or what, then, is the Devil? And how would we actually recognize him if he showed up?

The cover of Arthur Lyons's Satan Wants You, the title in all caps and white text with a red subtitle in the same font that reads "The Cult of Devil Worship". On the cover, a black and white photo of Anton LaVey dressed in Satanic ritual robes and posing as Uncle Sam in front of a nude model lying on an altar.
The traditional iconography of Satan is re-presented here on the cover of crime fiction writer Arthur Lyons’s exploration of Satanism. The book traces the history and rise of Satanic belief from sixth-century Persia to the doctrine of LaVeyan Satanism in the 20th century. BF1548 .L96 1971.

The Apocalypse long loomed over the religious life of Western Europe.  From the rise of the early Church to the Protestant Reformation, Christian life anticipated the Second Coming, and it involved daily interactions with the divine, and the demonic, as a result.  The general population understood the spirit world to be intimately tied to their own, and ecclesiastical authorities attempted to exert control over how their congregations perceived and interacted with that world.  Canon scripture does not describe Satan, so early and medieval Christian artists had to develop an iconography that captured the Devil’s evolving role as tempter, tyrant, and rebel angel. They had to visually embody evil.  Within centuries, the Devil acquired his characteristic hooves and horns, icons drawn from the Greco-Roman Pan and Jewish seirim that Western Christian artists grafted onto the demonic.  And ecclesiastical authorities made sure that that iconography accompanied the texts moving out of scriptoria.

A woodcut of demons dragging and prodding naked souls of men and women into a large, leonine Hellmouth.
Example of a medieval Hellmouth. The woodcut is part of a large decorative border surrounding contemplative prayers in a French Book of Hours (16th-century). It depicts demons dragging and prodding the naked souls of men and women into the jaws of a leonine monster. The adjacent woodcuts depict the breaking of the fourth seal in Revelation 6. ND3363.K4 C3 superv’d.

The early modern period further intensified the early and medieval Church’s demonological iconography.  The visual tradition remained in print, even during the far more iconoclastic Protestant Reformation.  Protestants emphasized the written word over Catholic visualization and ceremony, but they proved themselves the masters of the accompanying image, too.  Using well-established visual rhetoric, Protestants developed an effective way to deliver their anticlerical, reforming message.  Even before Martin Luther distributed his Theses on Halloween 1517, critics of the Papacy lampooned it with demonic imagery.  This provided Protestants a range of visual sources to capitalize on and modify.  In their hands, the Catholic image of the Devil would become the Catholic hierarchy of offices itself.  But in prose, the Protestants argued that the Devil was terrifyingly mutable and, therefore, far more difficult to recognize.

A woodcut of a devil dressed in papal vestments and carrying a pitchfork. Two horns curl out from under a mitre blazing with hellfire. The devil is shirtless, and his chest is a demonic face. The woodcut is labeled "Ego sum Papa".
Pope Alexander VI is lampooned as a demon who declares, “Ego sum Papa” (I am the Pope). The woodcut originates from a Parisian handbill of the late 15th century and is reprinted here in M.M. Sheĭnman’s Вера в дьявола в истории религии [Faith in the Devil in the History of Religion]. BT981 .S53.
Protestants believed that the Devil could easily trick Catholics without having to change his appearance.  But for Protestants, who viewed themselves as true believers, the Devil could not so easily deceive them.  While visual aids in books and pamphlets could represent the internalized evil of the Devil, Protestants understood the Devil’s exterior was always trying to appear innocuous.  Visual aids simply weren’t enough to understand evil anymore.

Arthur Lyons’s Satan Wants You, the Thielman Kerver Heures a lussaige de Rome, and M.M. Sheĭnman’s Вера в дьявола в истории религии will be on display in the Fearrington Reading Room at Wilson Special Collections Library as part of RBC’s Hallowzine event.  Please join us on Thursday, October 31, from 3:00-4:30 pm for more spooky books, zine-making fun, and a book-themed costume contest with a generous prize for best costume!

‘The Blood is the Life’: Dracula and 19th-Century Transfusions

In Bram Stoker’s genre-defining novel Dracula, after a series of sleepwalking episodes leaves Lucy Westenra mysteriously exsanguinated, her friend and jilted suitor, John Sewell, consults his former medical teacher, Abraham Van Helsing, to find a cure for Lucy’s anemia. “She wants blood, and blood she must have or die” (123-24)–these words, muttered by Van Helsing as he tries to save his dying patient, catapult readers out of gothic vampire fiction and into 19th-century medical reality.

First edition of Dracula, bound in yellow buckram with red title and border
Front cover of the first edition (1897) PR6037.T617 D7 1897, superv’d

Transfusions in Stoker’s time weren’t completely uncommon. James Blundell, an English obstetrician, performed many of the first successful human-to-human transfusions in the early 19th century, but he often found that many of his patients “suffered fever, backache, headache and passed dark urine”–all signs of blood incompatibility. First published in 1897, Dracula predates physician Karl Landsteiner’s discovery of blood type cross-matching by several years, and, like the contemporary science the novel immortalizes in its pages, it never mentions whether the four transfusions Lucy receives are compatible ones.  Instead, Stoker tells his readers that it is male vitality that continues to rouse her: “You are a man and it is a man we want” (123).

Stoker owes a great deal to Blundell’s language, whose report in an 1829 issue of the Lancet established the idea of transfusion as “life-giving”: “…the patient expresses herself very strongly on the benefits  resulting  from the injection of the blood; her observations are equivalent to this—that she felt as if life were infused into her body.”

Contemporary cover of Jennings' Transfusions. Plum-colored cloth featuring the title in gold-lettering
Cover of Jennings’ Transfusion (1883) WB 356 J54t 1883

British physician Charles Egerton Jennings also wrote on transfusion’s “life-giving” properties.  In his book Transfusion, a short work on the process’s history and “modes of application,” Jennings advocates for the continued use of and experimentation with transfusions.  He saw their application as a vital component to contemporary medical treatment, especially obstetrics, and believed they were necessary to save at-risk parturient women. Complications during childbirth were common well into 19th-century Britain, and severe hemorrhages, while less frequent than in the past, were not unusual.  Jennings’s short treatise offers hopeful solutions to the country doctor, providing him with new tactics and a patent for new transfusion siphons that are ideally safer and easier to transport.

 

Jennings' figure of a siphon for a combined method of transfusion, including a small vessel to carry saline fluids, and a bifurcated tube that can be used for direct transfusion.
Jennings’ “syphon for intra-venous injection and a modified form of canula”. The siphon features a vessel that holds a saline solution that he believed could act as a blood supplement, as well as a bifurcated tube that can transport the solution as well as blood from a donor.

Today, we read Dracula and find the idea of transfusion probable, even banal. However, in 1897, when the novel was published, transfusion was an experimental process rife with dangerous complications. Air could easily find its way in transfusion equipment and cause fatal embolisms, blood could coagulate and clot siphons, and the equipment itself was often difficult to transport and rarely available for emergency transfusions in country homes outside the universities and hospitals of major cities, like London.  That Van Helsing risks the operation reinforces his position as an eccentric and experimental physician, and highlights the novel’s attention to the conflict between modern science and the folkloric horrors its theories cannot account for.

A first edition printing of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and an early printing of Charles Egerton Jennings’s Transfusion will be on display in the Fearrington Reading Room at Wilson Special Collections Library as part of RBC’s Hallowzine event.  Please join us on Thursday, October 31, from 3:00-4:30 pm for more spooky books, zine-making fun, and a book-themed costume contest with a generous prize for best costume!