Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 310

KONRAD GESNER (1516-1565) Epistolarum medicinalium . . . libri III. Excudebat Christoph. Frosch. 1577 [8] 140 [28] ll., illus. 20.3 cm.

For more information on this author or work, see number: 307

These 226 letters on a wide variety of medical topics, edited by Caspar Wolf (see No. 364), Gesner's literary executor, and published posthumously, indicate the wide interests and scientific insights of this great Renaissance scholar. The book contains two botanical tracts and three fine woodcuts of plants from Gesner's huge collection of drawings and woodcuts of plants which were to form the illustrative portion of his projected history of plants. Only a handful were published in the sixteenth century, and the plates passed from one botanist or publisher to another until, in the eighteenth century, they came into the hands of the botanist and bibliographer, Christopher Trew (1695-1769), who published them in Opera botanica (1754-1771), using such wood blocks as were still usable or having copperplates engraved from the drawings. The original drawings and blocks then were lost to view until 1929, when they were discovered in the attic of the library of the University of Erlangen. In 1973 appeared the first fascicule of a large project to publish the facsimile the corpus of the works of Gesner found at Erlangen. Inscribed on the title page of this copy of the Epistolarum is the signature of Johannes Gesner, eighteenth-century descendant of Konrad and an important naturalist of his time.

See Related Record(s): 364

Cited references: Durling 2067; Osler 647; Waller 3521; Wellcome 2805

Gift of John Martin, M.D.