FALCUTIUS, Nicolaus (d. c.1412)

Lot 125
10.12.2025 12:00UTC +00:00
Classic
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Lieu de l'événementRoyaume-Uni, London
Commissionsee on Website%
ID 1514529
Lot 125 | FALCUTIUS, Nicolaus (d. c.1412)
Valeur estimée
£ 10 000 – 15 000
FALCUTIUS, Nicolaus (d. c.1412)
Sermones medicinales septem. Venice: Bernardinus Stagninus, de Tridino, 24 December 1490 – 8 October 1491.
Second edition of a vast compendium of medieval medical knowledge by a 14th-century Florentine physician: a fine and complete set. All seven parts are rare and, according to RareBookHub, no complete set has ever previously appeared at auction.

First printed by Damianus de Confaloneriis at Pavia between 1481 and 1484, the Sermones of Falcutius is a comprehensive handbook of theoretical and practical medicine drawing on Greek and Arabic influences including Galen and Avicenna. ‘Falcucci devoted the bulk of his enormous work—it runs to roughly four million words—to a discussion of the causes, symptoms, and cure of all known illnesses, ordered from general to particular and according to the organ affected […] Falcucci acknowledged no gulf between theory and practice. He considered medical theory the backbone of therapeutics; it gave a rationale to each medicinal, dietary, and surgical procedure, and this offered specific guidance to the doctor faced with an ambiguous case or a choice of treatments. Medical treatment was always to be guided by an understanding of causal principles; this set the formally trained doctor above the empiric, whose cures he described as due to luck rather than knowledge’ (Park). H 11768*; BMC V 366; BSB-Ink F-48; GW 9705; Goff F-46; ISTC if00046000; Park, K. Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (2014).

7 parts in 4 volumes, royal folio (414 x 289mm). Comprising: I) De conservatione sanitates (15 April 1491). 50 leaves; II) De febribus (7 July 1491). 234 leaves (of 232, with leaves h3 and h5 in duplicate); III) De membris capitis (24 December 1490). 178 leaves; IV) De membris spiritualibus (5 August 1491). 96 leaves; V) De membris naturalibus (18 June 1491). 180 leaves; VI) De membris generationis (5 August 1491). 60 leaves; VII) De cirurgia et de decoratione (8 October 1491). 206 leaves. Titles printed in red, tables in red and black, capital spaces with printed guide letters (occasional minor spotting and staining, a few quires with tiny wormholes, part VII with first text leaf splitting from textblock and repaired tear into 9.6). 17th-century blind-panelled pigskin, sides with large central arabesque, spines lettered in manuscript (a little rubbed, spines somewhat darkened). Provenance: numerous early marginal annotations – Cornelius Henricus à Roy (1750-1833, Dutch physician who served as a doctor to King Louis Napoleon between 1808 and 1810, and amassed an extraordinary medical and scientific library of c.18,000 titles which was sold at auction in 1834; armorial bookplate. This set is presumably no.1527 in his Catalogus bibliothecae medicae Cornelii Henrici à Roy (1830)) – Royal Society of Medicine (ink stamps [Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society]).
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