Anuce Foës

Anuce Foës, Latinized as Anutius Foësius (Metz, 1528–1595), was a physician, Hellenist, translator, and editor whose career united municipal medical service with the philological recovery of the Hippocratic corpus. His intellectual identity was inseparable from Metz, where he was born and later practised, but his scholarship belonged to the broader European movement of medical humanism: the attempt to establish ancient Greek medical texts through direct consultation of manuscripts, comparison of printed editions, lexical investigation, and translation from Greek rather than continued dependence upon medieval Latin and Arabic traditions. Foës was not merely a translator of Hippocrates; he became one of the principal sixteenth-century architects of the printed Hippocratic corpus. ([catalogue.bnf.fr](https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark%3A/12148/cb12565489f))

Foës received his advanced education in Paris, where Jacques Houllier and Jacques Goupil were among the physicians associated with his formation; Jean Fernel also appears in the tradition concerning his access to learned medical circles. His Parisian years gave him both the linguistic competence and the manuscript resources upon which his later editorial work depended. Through his teachers he obtained access to Hippocratic manuscripts preserved in the royal library at Fontainebleau and to material derived from Vatican manuscripts. Modern manuscript research associates him with several Greek codices now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and records the importance of collations made or transmitted by Parisian scholars. The precise extent to which Foës personally copied each witness is not always recoverable, but his editorial apparatus demonstrates sustained engagement with manuscript variants, earlier printed texts, ancient glossaries, and the annotations of contemporary physicians. ([docnum.univ-lorraine.fr](https://docnum.univ-lorraine.fr/public/BUPHA_T_2015_WAJSBERG_CALLANQUIN_MICHELINE.pdf))

After returning to Metz, Foës combined scholarship with civic practice. Following the appearance of his first book in 1560, he was appointed a stipendiary physician of the city, an office that entailed the treatment of the poor and responsibilities relating to hospitals, epidemics, and public hygiene. This institutional position is essential to an understanding of his career: unlike many itinerant Renaissance physicians, he remained closely attached to his native city, while the regular obligations of municipal medicine accompanied decades of textual work. His earliest publication, Hippocratis Coi liber secundus de morbis vulgaribus, issued at Basel in 1560, treated the difficult second book of the Hippocratic Epidemics. It was followed in 1561 by the Pharmacopoeia medicamentorum omnium, a substantial collection of medicinal preparations. Although sometimes described as a Messine pharmacopoeia, it was not a statutory civic code in the later sense; rather, it assembled and organized therapeutic formulae derived largely from established pharmaceutical traditions. ([docnum.univ-lorraine.fr](https://docnum.univ-lorraine.fr/public/BUPHA_T_2015_WAJSBERG_CALLANQUIN_MICHELINE.pdf))

Foës’s most original preliminary contribution to Hippocratic scholarship was the Oeconomia Hippocratis, printed at Frankfurt by the heirs of Andreas Wechel in 1588. Conceived as an alphabetical guide to Hippocratic language, the work explains difficult words, expressions, and usages by drawing upon the Hippocratic writings themselves and upon Greek poets, historians, philosophers, lexicographers, and medical commentators. It functioned simultaneously as lexicon, verbal concordance, and interpretative apparatus, and remained useful long after the appearance of Foës’s collected edition. Subsequent scholarship has complicated the traditional image of the Oeconomia as an entirely autonomous undertaking: Marie-Laure Monfort has argued that it preserves material connected with the lost Hippocratic commentaries of Janus Cornarius. Whatever the precise history of its sources, the work displays Foës’s characteristic method—philology placed at the service of medical interpretation. ([docnum.univ-lorraine.fr](https://docnum.univ-lorraine.fr/public/BUPHA_T_2015_WAJSBERG_CALLANQUIN_MICHELINE.pdf))

The culmination of his scholarship was the folio Magni Hippocratis medicorum omnium facile principis opera omnia quae extant, published at Frankfurt in 1595 by the heirs of Andreas Wechel in association with Claude de Marne and Johann Aubry. The Greek and Latin texts were printed in parallel columns and arranged in eight sections according to the classification attributed to the ancient glossator Erotian. Foës supplied a new Latin translation, extensive annotations, manuscript variants, supplementary observations, and multiple indexes. The Greek text remained substantially indebted to earlier printed recensions, particularly the Froben–Cornarius tradition, whereas the Latin version and annotations frequently embodied readings and corrections not admitted into the facing Greek. This discrepancy, later emphasized by Émile Littré and Jacques Jouanna, reveals both the strength and the limitation of Foës’s editorial procedure: he was often a penetrating critic in translation and commentary, yet comparatively conservative when altering the received Greek text. ([docnum.univ-lorraine.fr](https://docnum.univ-lorraine.fr/public/BUPHA_T_2015_WAJSBERG_CALLANQUIN_MICHELINE.pdf))

The material form of the 1595 edition is itself significant in the history of learned printing. Its Greek text employed types derived from the celebrated grecs du roi, the royal Greek characters cut by Claude Garamont after the calligraphy of Angelo Vergezio. Copies of the first edition also preserve distinct states of the preliminary or concluding matter. Jacques Jouanna’s investigation showed that an address to the reader in which Foës acknowledged annotations supplied by Johannes Opsopoeus was suppressed in some copies and replaced by a letter to Petrus Laphileus. Surviving copies in Copenhagen confirm that this alteration occurred within the first edition itself, providing an instructive example of substantial textual variation among copies bearing the same place and date of publication. ([numerabilis.u-paris.fr](https://numerabilis.u-paris.fr/ressources/pdf/sfhm/hsm/HSMx1988x022x002/HSMx1988x022x002x0125.pdf))

Foës died at Metz in 1595, the year in which his principal edition appeared. His Latin translation was issued separately in 1596, and the complete Hippocratic edition was repeatedly reprinted at Frankfurt during the seventeenth century. A major Geneva edition, printed by Samuel Chouët in 1657 and subsequently associated with a new edition of the Oeconomia dated 1662, further consolidated the circulation of his work; its Greek typography again employed the royal types, while Étienne Le Clerc supplied a concordance connecting the corpus with the Oeconomia. Foës’s translation continued to inform later editions, and his annotations retained authority even after newer critical methods had exposed the limitations of his Greek text. Littré regarded the edition as a repository of valuable variants, learned notes, and conjectural corrections; modern scholarship, while more attentive to Foës’s debts to Cornarius and other predecessors, continues to recognize the scale of his achievement. His historical importance lies not in the creation of a definitive Hippocratic text, but in the integration of manuscripts, Renaissance print culture, Greek philology, Latin translation, and practical medicine into an editorial enterprise of exceptional durability. ([ncbi.nlm.nih.gov](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/100965195))