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Historical Anatomies Home > Browse Titles > Johannes de Ketham: Fasiculo de medicina

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Page 1 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina, featuring Petrus de Montagnana and his library. The frontispiece features the commentator, translator, and philologist Petrus de Montagnana. He is portrayed as a prototypical Humanist, a man of books, rather than as a physician. The books in his surroundings are medical and include a dozen captioned volumes calling forth the physician’s great authorities. Below Petrus de Montagnana are a sick male and female patient awaiting treatment.

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Page 2 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina, featuring a senior doctor who, in full academic garb with the professor’s distinctive hat, toga, and stole, points at a flask in a gesture of understanding and teaching, instructing the four junior colleagues accompanying him what 'signs' or diagnosis he reads in the urine, as in 'Grand Rounds.'

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Page 3 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina features a diagnostic uroscopy chart. The chart identifies the differences in urine by color, contents, and consistency. The focus is on colors, each of which is represented by a matula or flask.  The color of urine also reflected the predominance of one of the four humors in the examined person; this predominance determined one’s 'temperament' as (clockwise, from top left) sanguine, choleric, melancholic, or phlegmatic.

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Page 4 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina dealing with urine. At the bottom right corner of the page is the NLM stamp.

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Page 7 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina featuring the disease man. This drawing serves as a diagram of the diseases that affect different parts of the body and is a famous example of Renaissance anatomical realism. Four columns on either side of the figure list diseases alphabetically, generally without relation to logic or pathology. Some diseases, on the other hand, are recognized as local: these are listed from head to toe, from quinsy of the throat and bad fingernails, to gout in the feet; in between, we see 'running of the chest,' arthritis in the arms, 'passion' of the heart, cramps in the legs, and, most strikingly, cancer of the testicles.

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Page 15 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina, featuring zodiac man, a human figure with the parts of the body identified with signs of the zodiac.

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Page 16 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina, featuring bloodletting man, detailing a map of the veins to be incised for bloodletting.

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Page 24 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina, featuring wound man, detailing wounds from swords, daggers, and arrows, and blows from rocks and clubs, as well as knife wounds from domestic and occupational accidents.

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Page 37 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina. Page 8 are six illustrations of the parts of the ear. Page 9 are four illustrations of the parts of the nose.

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Page 51 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina, featuring a visit to a plague victim. The image shows a plague victim who, judging from his face, is in bad shape but, judging from the setting, rather privileged. A physician is visiting the patient at home. He is taking the pulse, while holding to his nose a sponge soaked with wine vinegar. Three women are attending to the patient, and two men are standing next to the physician; a cat sits on the floor in lower right corner.

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Page 64 of Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de medicina, featuring the dissection of a cadaver. This is the first realistic depiction of an anatomy lecture held at a university, namely in an academic hall at the University of Padua. In the chair, a relatively junior doctor, the lector, is set to recite from Mondino’s Anathomia. Behind the table, to the right, a senior doctor begins to point, in his role of demonstrator or ostensor. The basket in front will collect all the parts, to be carefully reunited with the corpse for burial.

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