Beschreibung:

Bifolium from Gerard of Cremona (also de Sabloneta), Practica Joannis Serapionis, a Latin translation of Serapions medical handbook, manuscript on parchment [Italy (perhaps south), late thirteenth or early fourteenth century] Two conjoined leaves, each with double column of 49 lines of a rounded Italian gothic bookhand, some quotations underlined in red, red rubrics and initials, small amount of marginalia, tiny instructions to rubricator surviving in top margin, scribbles on innermost pages from later reuse in binding of French accounts dated in several places 1586, blank outermost corners cut away, overall fair and presentable condition, each leaf 305 by 218mm. Serapion (more properly Yúhānnā Ibn Serapion) was a ninth-century Nestorian physician who wrote two medical compendia in Syriac. The shorter of the two was translated into Arabic and thence to Latin by Gerard of Cremona (the thirteenth-century translator of medical texts, to be distinguished from his twelfth-century namesake who translated Aristotle and similar). It is formed from seven separate treatises dealing with diseases of the body and nerves; diseases of eye, mouth, lung, breast and heart; diseases of stomach, intestines, and those caused by worms; diseases of liver, spleen, kidneys, and bladder, and gout; skin diseases, wounds caused by a bite, and gynaecological diseases; fever; and composite medicines. The bifolium here contains part of the sixth treatise, and concerns abscesses of the kidneys and bladder and their cures, the creation of kidney stones and their methods of manual extraction.