Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 91.5

POPE JOHN XXI (ca.1215-1277) The treasuri of helth : contaynynge many profytable medicines gathered out of Hipocrat[es], Gale[n] & Auicen by one Petrus Hyspanus ; & tra[n]slated into Englysh by Hu[m]fre Lloyd who hath added therunto ye causes & sygnes of euery dysease. W[ith] the Aphorismes of Hipocrates. And Jacobus de Partybus redacted to a certayne order according to ye me[m]bres of mans bodys. And a compendiouse table conteyning the purging and confortatiue medicines, wyth the exposicion of certayne names & weyghtes in thys boke contayned. Wyth an Epistle of Diocles vnto Kyng Antigonus By Wyllyam Coplande 1556 2nd 454 unnumbered pages 15 cm

This is the second edition in English (first 1550) of one of the most popular medical books of the Middle Ages; first written about 1260 (Garrison and Morton). Petrus Hispanus, elected Pope in 1276 under the name of John XXI, is the only physician so far to have attained the papacy. His Thesaurus pauperum, a practical compendium of medical remedies, was among the most popular textbooks of its kind up to the sixteenth century; it went through numerous editions after its first printing in 1476 and was translated into Spanish, Italian, Portugese, English and Hebrew. Because of his great knowledge, Petrus Hispanus was thought by some to have sold his soul to the devil – who, it was believed, called in the debt by engineering Petrus’s tragic death under the collapsed ceiling of his palace at Viterbo eight months after he assumed the papacy. However, Dante mentioned Petrus in the twelfth canto of his Paradiso as the only contemporary pope he met in Paradise (Norman catalogue p 428).

Cited references: NLM 16th 2597

John Martin M.D. Endowment