The Henry E. Sigerist Medieval Manuscript Reproduction Collection: A Finding List

On a fine day in May 1933, Henry Sigerist set out on a quest. In his words, “there was no escape from the early Middle Ages for me, and . . . I would have to stick to the job, until the whole period was elucidated.” ¹ During that summer, he began to create a catalog of all extant medical texts from the early Middle Ages. His modus operandi was to visit libraries throughout Europe, personally studying all possible manuscripts. In practice, it appears that he gathered photostats of those manuscript leaves which interested him. The collection had its genesis in Karl Sudhoff’s own cache of manuscript photostats at Leipzig, as well as in Sudhoff’s cajoling Sigerist into studying the early Middle Ages. ² Sigerist spent the next twenty-five years collecting, collating, and publishing descriptions of these manuscripts, but he never finished his project. At his death on 17 March 1957, the Institute of the History of Medicine became the beneficiary of his efforts in the holdings he left behind, the “Henry E. Sigerist Medieval Manuscript Reproduction Collection.” ³ The collection includes photostats of 153 manuscripts and manuscript fragments from forty libraries; it was incompletely described by Sigerist in six publications. ⁴ What follows is a finding list of the manuscripts and manuscript excerpts, in photostat form, held by the Institute.

Sigerist never formally cataloged the entire collection. In the summer of 1987 Professor Vivian Nutton, of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, London, visited Hopkins on an annual exchange program between the two institutes. ⁵ As one part of his activities, Nutton began to inventory the contents of Sigerist’s collection. He indicated the presence of particular items by annotating the Institute’s reference copy of Augusto Beccaria’s I codici di medicina del periodo presalernitano. Four years ago, I went through the collection, corrected and computerized Nutton’s initial notations, and then completed the cataloging process. In the main, I have used the foliations/paginations indicated on the photostats by Sigerist and the originating libraries. In some cases, where there were inconsistencies with published catalogs, I have examined the original manuscripts or contacted the librarians in charge of the manuscripts. Recently the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy generously awarded a grant to reproduce the collection onto acid-free paper. This fund has been supplemented by support from the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine. Upon completion, the copies will be bound into ring binders for easier access by scholars. ⁶

The collection is made up of early medieval medical texts in contemporary or later manuscript form. ⁷ The majority of the manuscript excerpts are in Latin, the rest being in Arabic, Greek, or Hebrew. The codices from which they derive range in date from roughly the eighth century to the fifteenth, though the majority are from the tenth through the fourteenth. Only seven manuscripts seem to be completely copied. ⁸ The collection contains many treatises on medical receipts and pharmacies, reflecting Sigerist’s early interest in medieval pharmaceutical literature. ⁹ Examples of the types of pharmaceutical texts are readily drawn from Sigerist’s 1941 Bulletin article: “Antidotum et Pessum” (p. 30), several regiminal/treatment letters (e.g., p. 34), Dynamidia (p. 35), weights and measures (pp. 36–37), antidotaries (pp. 38–39), Index Apuleianus (p. 42), and herbals (pp. 44–47). ¹⁰ Anthimus’s De observatione ciborum (sixth century) is well represented in several copies. ¹¹ But Sigerist also found material for his study of the Sphere of Life and Death, ¹² and, amidst the Greek texts, many works by Hippocrates and a few by Galen—in particular, the Coan Prenotions, the Aphorisms, Prognostic, and the Prorrhetic of Hippocrates, and Galen’s De dieta pueri epilepsia in Hebrew. Sigerist was partial to medieval illustrations, particularly of an herbal or gynecological theme, and a number of photographs remain (the rest having succumbed to the attrition of time). The textual contents of the collection clearly fall into Sigerist’s spheres of interest and may not represent his true ambition...