BERENGARIO, Jacopo.

by Jacopo Berengario

£47,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

The scarce first edition of this ground-breaking medical work, a milestone in the history of neurotraumatology (Di Ieva). Jacopo Berengario da Carpi (1470-1530) was professor of anatomy at Bologna for 24 years, and he may be thought of as the immediate predecessor of Vesalius (Heirs of Hippocrates). Tractatus was a systematic treatise covering the mechanisms, classification, and medical and surgical treatment of head traumas , where he described an entire set of surgical instruments to be used for cranial operations to treat head traumas that became a reference for later generations of physicians (Di Ieva et al.). Berengario dedicated this work to Lorenzo II de Medici, who had suffered a skull injury. The work begins with an overview of types of head injuries: internal, as a consequence of trauma; external, from an object cutting the surface of the skull, bruising or npiercing it (incisio, contusio, perforatio). These can cause the damage to blood vessels in the skull, and be fatal. The early annotator was especially interested in contusio . Berengario suggests methods to determine whether specific skull bones are broken, e.g., asking the patient to chew on something and report any pain in the head as a consequence, and discusses odd circumstances, such as how trauma on one side of the head may cause the fracture of a bone on the opposite side, or anatomical questions (e.g., the membrane dura mater ). He also lists important symptoms to determine prognosis (e.g., fever, tremo

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.