# Oeconomia Hippocratis, alphabeti serie distincta. In qua dictionum apud Hippocratem omnium, praeserim obscuriorum, usus explicatur, & velut ex amplissimo penu depromitur: ita ut Lexicon Hippocrateum merito dici possit. Anutio Foesio Mediomatrico Medico, Authore **Autore:** Foës Anuce **Dati editoriali:** Frankfurt a.M., Heirs of Andreas Wechel, Claude Marne, & Johann Aubry, 1588 **Codice archivio:** 192 **Prezzo:** 4500.00 USD **Stato commerciale:** Disponibile **Link ufficiale:** https://www.govirarebooks.com/products/foes-oeconomia-hippocratis-1588 --- ## Descrizione accademica e analisi Folio (331x194 mm). [8], 694, [2] pp. Collation: ***4 A-Z6 Aa-Zz6 Aaa-Mmm6. Large woodcut device of the Wechel printing house, incorporating Pegasus, on the title-page and repeated on the final verso. Engraved medallion portrait of Foës by Pierre Woeiriot II on the verso of the title-page. Roman, Greek, and italic types; text in two columns, woodcut initials and headpieces. Contemporary stiff vellum, manuscript title on spine. An extensive Latin presentation inscription in the lower margin of the title-page, dated Padua, 1642, in the hand of Heinrich Magnus Heigel, addressed to Johann Georg Wirsung (“Viro Nobilissimo et Excellentissimo D.no Jos. Georgio Wirsing Medico Expertissimo, Patrono atque Fautori suo aetatem sospiciendo, debita gratitudinis ergo d.d. Henricus Magnus Heigel Noriberg. Patavii 1642”). Some uniform browning, otherwise a very good, genuine copy,. The first edition of one of the most ambitious achievements of Renaissance medical lexicography, and a fundamental instrument in the recovery of the original Greek medical tradition. The Oeconomia Hippocratis is the culmination of Anuce Foës’s prolonged engagement with the language, textual transmission, and interpretation of the Hippocratic corpus. Far more than a conventional medical dictionary, it is an attempt to reconstruct the vocabulary of Hippocrates systematically, explaining the meanings and usages of difficult or obscure expressions through comparison with passages elsewhere in the Hippocratic writings and with the testimony of other ancient medical authorities. Born at Metz in 1528, Foës studied medicine in Paris before returning to his native city, where he combined medical practice with an increasingly intensive programme of Greek scholarship. His earliest substantial publication, the Pharmacopoeia of 1561, already demonstrated his conviction that contemporary medicine could benefit from the critical recovery of ancient medical terminology and prescriptions. In the Oeconomia, published twenty-seven years later, that scholarly undertaking acquired an altogether different scale. The work’s alphabetical organization was intended to overcome one of the principal obstacles confronting Renaissance readers of Hippocrates: the difficulty of establishing the precise meaning of technical expressions employed across writings of different dates, subjects, and intellectual traditions. The title deliberately presents the book as a Lexicon Hippocrateum. Its significance, however, lies not merely in the number of words collected, but in the method employed to explain them. Foës sought to establish meaning through contextual comparison, distinguishing individual usages, gathering parallel passages, and confronting the interpretative evidence supplied by Galen and other Greek medical writers. The resulting volume constitutes a substantial contribution to the development of medical philology as a discipline in which the correct understanding of ancient medicine depended upon the recovery of its historical vocabulary. Garrison-Morton-Norman (no. 6793) identifies the work as a Greek alphabetical dictionary of Hippocratic vocabulary founded upon extensive investigation of ancient medical literature. Foës’s achievement belongs to the wider sixteenth-century movement of medical humanism, associated with such scholars as Janus Cornarius, Henri Estienne, and Jean de Gorris. The publication of Greek medical dictionaries and the recovery of the ancient lexicographical tradition had already established important precedents. Foës’s particular contribution was to concentrate that apparatus of scholarship upon Hippocrates and to develop an extensive repertory through which the Hippocratic writings could be read comparatively. His undertaking thus forms part of the transformation of Renaissance medicine from a discipline dependent upon inherited Latin interpretations into one increasingly concerned with the Greek texts themselves and the historical circumstances of their composition. The Oeconomia was also closely connected with Foës’s greatest subsequent editorial achievement, the monumental Greek-Latin edition of the Hippocratic corpus published at Frankfurt in 1595, seven years after the present volume. In that edition, entitled Magni Hippocratis medicorum omnium facile principis opera omnia quae extant and considered as the first Greek-Latin edition of the complete extant Hippocratic corpus and the most important such edition before Émile Littré’s nineteenth-century undertaking, Foës supplied a new Latin translation, annotations, and an arrangement of the writings in eight sections. The 1588 Oeconomia should therefore be understood as an essential stage in Foës’s larger editorial enterprise: the lexicographical investigation of Hippocratic terminology preceded and underpinned his comprehensive effort to establish and interpret the ancient medical texts. The historical importance of the present copy is greatly enhanced by its remarkable contemporary presentation inscription, recording a gift made in Padua in 1642 by Heinrich Magnus Heigel to Johann Georg Wirsung, the discoverer of the principal pancreatic duct. Both the donor and the recipient can be securely identified. The handwriting of the dedication has been compared directly with that of Heigel’s surviving autograph letter to Johann Caspar Bauhin, preserved at Basel. The inscription identifies Wirsung as an exceptionally accomplished physician and as Heigelìs patron and supporter. The recipient’s surname, written Wirsing, is not a discrepancy but an especially valuable historical detail. Giuseppe Ongaro, in his documentary study Wirsung a Padova 1629–1643, specifically records Wirsing among the variant spellings found in the registers and correspondence of the German students’ nation at Padua. Heinrich Magnus Heigel belonged to the educated medical world of seventeenth-century Nuremberg and participated in the international academic peregrinations characteristic of physicians from the German-speaking lands. His documented university career places him at Groningen in August 1634 and at Leiden in May 1636. The present inscription supplies a further, particularly significant point in his intellectual itinerary, establishing his presence at Padua in 1642 and his personal association with Johann Georg Wirsung. Three years later Heigel obtained his doctorate in medicine at the University of Basel, where his degree was conferred on 28 October 1645 under Johann Caspar Bauhin. In November of the same year he married Anna Maria Curio in Basel. His subsequent correspondence with Bauhin, including a letter of 1647, confirms the continuation of his connections with the medical scholars of that university. Heigel died in 1683. Johann Georg Wirsung, born in Augsburg in 1589, was one of the most consequential anatomical investigators associated with the University of Padua during the first half of the seventeenth century. After pursuing medical studies in the German lands and France, he arrived in Padua in 1629 and obtained his doctorate in philosophy and medicine in 1630. He subsequently established himself there as a physician and surgeon, undertaking anatomical investigations and working in proximity to Johann Vesling, professor of anatomy, surgery, and botany. At the beginning of March 1642, precisely the year of Heigel’s presentation, Wirsung demonstrated the main pancreatic duct in the human body. The discovery was made during a dissection attended by Thomas Bartholin and Moritz Hoffmann, whose observations and subsequent accounts became central to the history of the discovery. Wirsung’s identification of the duct established the anatomical course of the principal channel through which pancreatic secretions enter the duodenum, a structure thereafter known as the ductus Wirsungianus. The discovery was commemorated in an anatomical engraving prepared at Padua, while Wirsung communicated his findings to Jean Riolan the Younger in July 1643. The circumstances of the discovery and the contributions of Hoffmann became subjects of later historical discussion, but Wirsung's identification and representation of the pancreatic duct secured his enduring place in the history of anatomy. His career ended abruptly in August 1643, when he was shot and killed at Padua. The posthumous inventory of his possessions, drawn up on 23 August of that year, provides unusually valuable documentation of the material and intellectual environment in which he lived. --- ## Bibliografia di riferimento Adams, H. M. Catalogue of Books Printed on the Continent of Europe, 1501–1600, in Cambridge Libraries. Cambridge, 1967, vol. I, F-660. Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (VD16), F-1749. ICCU / SBN, bibliographic record BVEE001615. Garrison, Fielding H. An Introduction to the History of Medicine. 4th ed. Philadelphia and London, 1929, p. 197. Heirs of Hippocrates: The Development of Medicine in a Catalogue of Historic Books in the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences. Iowa City, 1980, no. 348. Garrison-Morton-Norman. Morton's Medical Bibliography: An Annotated Check-list of Texts Illustrating the History of Medicine, online edition, no. 6793. Ongaro, Giuseppe. Wirsung a Padova 1629-1643. Treviso, 2010, pp. 205-. Stolberg, Michael. “Wirsung, Johann Georg (Wirsüng, Wirsungius).” Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 28 (2024), p. 281. Robert-Dumesnil, Alexandre-Pierre-François. Le Peintre-graveur français. Vol. 7, p. 111, no. 285 (engraved portrait of Foës). Inventaire du fonds français, graveurs du seizième siècle. No. 57, p. 172 (Pierre Woeiriot II). --- *Documento generato automaticamente dall'Archivio Govi Rare Books per finalità di ricerca e catalogazione.*