Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 311.5

REMBERT DODOENS (1517-1585) A nievve herbal, or, Historie of plantes : wherein is contayned the vvole discourse and perfect description of all sortes of herbes and plantes : their diuers and sundry kindes, their strange figures, fashions, and shapes : their names/natures/operations/and vertues : and that not onely of those which are here growyng in this our cuntrie of Englande but of all others also of forrayne realmes commonly used in physcke / first set foorth in the Doutche or Almaigne tongue, by that learned D. Rembert Dodoens… ; and now first translated out of French into English by Henry Lyte. G. Dewes 1578 1st illustrated English edition. [24], 779, [25] p. : ill., port. 30 cm.

Illustrated with more than 850 quarter-paged woodcuts of plants in the text. The title is framed by an elaborate woodcut border by Arnold Nicolai after Pierre van der Borcht. The full-paged woodcut coat-of-arms of the translator appears on the verso of the title page. A woodcut portrait of Dodoens appears after the dedicatory verses. The woodcut printer’s device of Henry Loe appears on the verso of the final leaf. Dodoens, along with Clusius and Lobel, was one of the three great Flemish botanists in the second half of the 16th c. “In 1554, Dodoens published ‘Cruydeboeck’, a national herbarium devoted to species indigenous to the Flemish provinces. The merit of this book was that, rather than proceeding by alphabetic order as Fuchs had done, Dodoens grouped the plants according to their properties and their reciprocal affinities” (DSB). At the end of the 16th c., the writings of Rembert Dodoens (Rembertus Dodonaeus), a physician and botanist in the Low Countries, exercised considerable influence in England. The author was born at Malines in 1517 and died at Leyden in 1585. We are told by Meerbeck that Dodoens studied medicine at Louvain, and afterwards visited the universities and medical schools in France, Italy and Germany. He finally returned to his native city, and in 1548 was nominated town physician. Dodoens became renowned as a doctor not only in his native land but also [in] other countries, and in 1574, he accepted an invitation from the Emperor Maximilian II to be court physician at Vienna. On the death of Maximilian, he remained for a time with the new Emperor, Rudolph II. He received a Chair of Medicine at Leyden University in 1582.

Cited references: Wellcome I #1814; Cushing D207; NLM 16th c. #1171