The assigned reading of the physician – Leonardo Botallo’s book in the collection of Poznań University Library

Abstract

The French section of the old and rare books department of Poznań University Library includes an interesting collection (bound volume) of the sixteenth century medical treatises published by Guillaume Rouillé and Paul Miraillet in Lyon that consists of two works by Galen: De naturalibus facultatibus libri tres (1548) and De bono et malo succo, liber unus (1547) as well as a treatise written by Donato Antonio Altomare: De alteratione, concoctione, digestione, praeparatione, ac purgatione: ex Hippocratis et Galeni sententia methodus (1548). The bound volume once belonged to Leonardo Botallo (1519-1587), an Italian anatomist and surgeon, court doctor to French kings. The text bears signs of his reading – there are numerous glosses on margins, underlined lines and hand-written comments in Latin. Even a cursory analysis of the notes (glosses), of Botallo’s critical remarks on Galen’s part in particular, allows us to examine the manifestation of the changes going on in medicine of the sixteenth century, i.e. the time when it reached a phase of being a fully-fledged modern branch of science. The presented general characteristics of the volume only makes an introduction to a more detailed study on the notes by Leonardo Botallo. Further studies would allow historians in medicine to reconstruct the views and opinions of the doctor from Asti in Piedmont that can testify to the attitude towards and approach to Galen’s work in the sixteenth century and to the contemporary debate surrounding their reception.