'Medicina Antiqua: Codex Vindobonensis 93', of the Vienna Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, with introduction by Peter Murray Jones and commentary by Franz Unterkircher. Price £48. London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1999. ISBN 1 872501 20 6.
Medicina Antiqua gives us a complete colour reproduction of the early 13th century southern Italian manuscript Codex Vindobenesis 93, held in Austria's state library. The work is a richly illustrated collection of Latin texts on the uses of plant and animal materia medica, drawn from classical Greek and Roman sources known and revered by medical scholars throughout medieval Europe. Murray Jones's introduction guides us through these sources and speculates on the origins of the codex itself. Some mystery attaches to the work: its contents were already becoming outmoded at the time of its production, as new thinking and more complete translations of the classic Greek authors began to enter southern Europe from the Arab world.
We are not given a full translation of the Codex's text and pharmacy historians would have welcomed fuller discussion of its descriptions of crude drugs and their preparation. The real joy of the book is in the illustrations dominating every page. Here we have not only the fine, full colour representations of plants, animals, doctors and patients included in the original manuscript, but two added series of near contemporary line drawings. These are full of human life (although bowdlerised by a later owner's erasure of the more flagrant displays of genitalia). Medicines are ground before us in stylish mortars while the suffering patients take a sometimes painful grip on our imagination.
Reviewer - Caroline Reed
Caroline Reed is curator of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's museum