Hunt Institute Archives Text Discovery Platform

Page transcription

Brunnfeis and his publisher were two interesting persons. The latter had originally limited his activity practically only to printing, to turn more and more to publishing, so that already in 1517 he had published a significant medical work, the "Feldtbuch der Wundartzney" ("Field-manual of surgery") by Hans von Gerssodoff. - Brunnfels came from Mainz, and perhaps he owes his liking for botany to the herbals that were printed there. First he entered a Carthusian monastery, but later he converted to Protestantism and became a preacher and teacher at Strassburg, so that medicine and botany became merely a side-line. In spite of this, the plants in his herbal are no longer classified alphabetically, but according to families. Also a difference has been made between male and female specimens of plants, so that he can be regarded as the first one who might claim with right the name of a botanist. At the same time he did not neglect the medical effects of the herbs, but added to the description of each plant a special passage, called "Kräft und Artzeney" ("Powers and medical properties."), in which, apart from Dioskorides, Galenos and other famous physicians of the antiquity, he also mentions as an authority Hieronymus von Braunschweig.

Brunnfels' work first appeared under the title "Herbarum vivae icones" in Latin, containing 2 fat volumes, which probably only reached the public in 1532, though the preface of the first volume is dated 1530, that of the second 1531. Both volumes together contain 100 full page (approximately 250 mm in height) and 75 smaller illustrations, drawn, as the preface mentions, by Hans Wyditz. They are quite well drawn and carefully cut, but only give the outlines without any shading. - In 1532, under the title "Contrafayt Kreuterbuch" (Illustrated Herbal), a German translation appeared, which was much more handy than the Latin one, as, though it contains the same pictures, it only holds 332 text pages and 6 columns of index.