The first English treatise on midwifery, translated by Richard Jonas from the 1532 Latin translation by Roesslin the Younger (De partu hominis) of Roesslin's work (1513). The 1540 English edition was illustrated with two sheets, printed on both sides, of crudely engraved "birth fygures" copied from Roesslin's woodcuts. These also appear, with minor changes "Stoole" for "Stwle") in the second edition of 1545. The second edition  was edited by the physician, Thomas Raynalde, who intended to augment it with a section on anatomy and illustrations of the female reproductive organs, but his intentions were not fully realized. Copies of the 1545 edition contain two engraved representations of the male trunk, possibly engraved on a one plate, printed on a single sheet, folded and stitched in the quire. They are engraved on a different plate, but correspond with the first and second figures on plate 30 of Germinus (1545), except that fig. 1 is reversed. Hind, Engraving in England pp. 44, 53-55. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science & Medicine (1991) No. 1844, with more extensive discussion of the 1545 edition. These engravings, and those in Geminus's anatomy, are the earliest engravings published in England.

Johannes von Beris (or Paris) lived in the mid-15th century near Metz, and is thus the earliest identifiable German surgeon, and the first to write about gunshot wounds and wound surgery. His work, which was first published in the above undated edition that was probably issued about 1540, is the oldest German surgical text. Beris "was the teacher of Heinrich von Pfolsprundt, whose manuscript, first published in the nineteenth century, is often cited as the first German work on surgery. Johannes is mentioned by Pfolsprundt with great praise as his most influential teacher. Johannes' original manuscdript is in the Metz Stadtbibliothek. The illustrations in the printed edition include a blood-letting man that is copied after Johann Stoeffler, a zodiac and wound man, and several bedside scenes" (Eugene S. Flamm, Printing and the Brain of Man (New York: The Grolier Club, 2011) No. 51.

The first book in which each muscle was illustrated separately, with copper-plates of the bones and muscles of the upper limb from drawings by Girolamo da Carpi, which in realism and exactitude surpassed anything between Leonardo and Vesalius. But having seen the woodcuts in Vesalius's Fabrica, the high-minded Ferrarese is said to have deliberately "suppressed his own book, and only 11 copies are now extant” (A. C. Klebs).

This work was reprinted in facsimile in Florence, 1925, edited by Harvey Cushing and Edward Clark Streeter. Digital facsimile of the facsimile edition from the Medical Heritage Library at the Internet Archive at this link. English translation in No. 461.3.

This plagiarism of Vesalius’s Tabulae anatomicae sex contains 25 woodcuts by Hans Baldung Grien (1484/1485-1545), and represents the artist’s only contribution to medical illustration. The woodcuts include the best illustrations of brain dissection techniques published before Vesalius’s Fabrica. As with most other sixteenth century medical books, Baldung Grien was not credited on the title page with authorship of the images.

A pocket dictionary of plants. Gesner, the “German Pliny”, produced the most encyclopedic bibliographies of his time. He attempted a Historia plantarum, which was unfinished at his death. See No. 1809.1. Digital facsimile of the 1541 edition from the Internet Archive at this link.

The first book on Alpinism and mountaineering. Digital facsimile from the Hathi Trust at this link. English translation by H. B. D. Soulé as Conrad Gesner: On the admiration of mountains; the prefatory letter addressed to Jacob Avienus, Physician, in Gesner's pamphlet "on milk and substances prepared from milk first printed at Zurich in 1543. A description of the Riven Mountain, commonly called aMount Pilatus, addressed to J. Chrysotome Huber, originally printed with another work of Gesner's at Zurich in 1555. San Francisco: The Grabhorn Press, 1937.

The earliest work devoted exclusively to physiology and the first to call the subject by that name. It was re-issued in 1554 as part of Fernel’s Medicina (No. 2271). Femel suggested that physicians should  study the human body themselves, and not accept tradition.

See Sir Charles Sherrington’s The endeavour of Jean Femel, Cambridge, 1946.  See also the English translation of the 1567 edition: The physiologia of Jean Fernel (1567). Translated and annotated by John M. Forrester. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003.

Text in Spanish and Latin. Digital facsimile from Google Books at this link.

Illustrated with full-page woodcut illustrations drawn by Albrecht Meyer, copied onto the blocks by Heinrich Füllmaurer and cut by Veit Rudolf Speckle; the artists' self-portraits appear on the final leaf. Describing and illustrating circa 400 native German and 100 foreign plants-- wild and domestic—in alphabetical order, with a discussion of their medical uses, De historia stirpium was probably inspired by the pioneering effort of Otto Brunfels, whose Herbarum vivae imagines had appeared twelve years earlier. "These two works have rightly been ascribed importance in the history of botany, and for two reasons. In the first place they established the requisites of botanical illustration—verisimilitude in form and habit, and accuracy of significant detail.... Secondly they provided a corpus of plant species which were identifiable with a considerable degree of certainty by any reasonably careful observer, no matter by what classical or vernacular names they were called...." (Morton, History of Botanical Science [1981] 124).

Fuchs's herbal contained the first glossary of botanical terms, and provided the first depictions of a number of American plants, including pumpkins and maize. The book is especially remarkable for its generous tribute to the artists Meyer, Füllmaurer and Speckle, whose self-portraits appear on the last leaf. This tribute to the artists may be unique among sixteenth century scientific works, many of which were illustrated by unidentified artists, or artists identified by name only. It is especially unusual for the name of the artist who transferred the drawings onto the woodblocks to be recorded, let alone for that artist to be portrayed.

Translated into French by Eloy de Maignan as Commentaires tres excellens de l'hystoire des plantes , composez premièrement en latin par Leonarth Fousch , medecin tres renommé . et depuis nouvellement traduictz en langue Françoise , par un homme scavant & bien expert en la matière. Paris: Chez Iacques Gazeau , en la rue Sainct Iehan de Latran devant le college de Cambrai, 1549.

Facsimile edition with commentary volume: The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs, edited by F. G. Meyer, E. M. Trueblood and J. L. Heller, 2 vols., Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. This includes English translations of selected portions of the herbal. For further information see the entry at HistoryofInformation.com at this link.

Dubois, better known as Sylvius, produced a new translation of the complete works of Mesue, which became the standard text, and was reprinted 21 times. Digital facsimile from Google Books at this link.

Shortly after publishing his encyclopedic De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, Vesalius issued De humani corporis fabrica epitome, also from the press of Johannes Oporinus of Basel. This thin set of 14 unnumbered leaves, each containing images and text, and published in large folio format even larger than the Fabrica, was an outline, or précis, or road-map of essential information contained in the Fabrica, including some different and spectacular larger images. This was the first time that the author of a revolutionary medical or scientific work issued a condensation of his essential information roughly simultaneously with the main publication. Vesalius suggested that the large sheets of the Epitome might be mounted on the walls of dissection rooms as a guide to dissection. While the Fabrica was a very expensive encyclopedic work, Vesalius' Epitome, though larger in format, was a much less expensive work that presented essential anatomical information in a concise, comparatively easy to understand manner. It became far more widely published and distributed than the Fabrica. By August 9, 1543 Vesalius published a German translation of the Epitome in Basel, and many plagiarisms and adaptations of the Epitome were published in various European countries, in a wide variety of formats, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Because of its much wider publication and distribution, even more than the Fabrica, Vesalius' Epitome was the publication that revolutionized the teaching and study of human anatomy. English translation by L. R. Lind (1949). Translated into French as Résumé de ses livres sur la fabrique du corps humain....Texte et traduction en français par Jacqueline Vons. Introduction, notes et commentaire par Jacqueline Vons et Stéphane Velut (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2008).

Published when the author was only 29 years old, the Fabrica revolutionized not only the science of anatomy but how it was taught. Throughout this encylopedic work on the structure and workings of the human body, Vesalius provided a fuller and more detailed description of the human anatomy than any of his predecessors, correcting errors in the traditional anatomical teachings of Galen. Even more epochal than his criticism of Galen and other medieval authorities was Vesalius’s assertion that the dissection of cadavers must be performed by the physician himself.

As revolutionary as the contents of the Fabrica and the anatomical discoveries which it published, was its unprecedented blending of scientific exposition, art and typography. The title page and series of woodcut musclemen remain the most famous anatomical illustrations of all time. The artist or artists responsible for these masterworks has been the source of continuing scholarly speculation for centuries. The latest interpretation follows the traditional view that many of the woodcuts were drawn by Jan van Calcar, and that some of the smaller, less artistic ones were drawn by Vesalius. In The illustrations from the works of Andreas Vesalius (1950) Saunders and O’Malley published reduced versions of all the illustrations from Vesalius’s writings, with a commentary and biographical sketch. The standard biography is C.D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, Berkeley, 1964. Harvey Cushing’s classic Biobibliography of Andreas Vesalius (1943) appeared in a second edition, Hamden, Conn., 1962. See also the dated but classic work, M. Roth, Andreas Vesalius Bruxellensis, Berlin, Reimer, 1892; reprinted Amsterdam,1965. The complete first edition of the Fabrica was first translated into English by William Richardson and John Burd Carman as On the Fabric of the Human Body. A Translation of De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem. 5 vols. San Francisco & Novato: Norman Publishing, 1998-2009. In 2014 Karger of Basel published in 2 vols. The Fabric of the Human Body. An Annotated Translation of the 1543 and 1555 Editions with Vesalius' Own Notes for a Never Published Third Edition by D.H. Garrison and M.H. Hast.

For further information on the 1543 edition see HistoryofInformation.com at this link.

An index of purgatives.

Translation by John Phaer of a book by Jehan Goeurot published in 1530. Garrison states that it is a version of the Regimen Sanitatis.

This elegantly printed and illustrated small folio included 210 text woodcuts, most probably after drawings by the school of Francesco Salviati (Francesco de'Rossi). It was issued from the press operated by Pierre Gautier in the Paris castle of Benevenuto Cellini. Guidi's Chirurgia was derived from the Nicetas Codex, a tenth-century illustrated Byzantine manuscript of surgical works on the treatment of fractures and luxations by Hippocrates, Galen and Oribasius. In 1542, Guidi presented an illustrated copy of this manuscript, along with the manuscript of his own illustrated Latin translation, to François I of France, whom he served as royal physician from 1542 until the king's death in 1547. These manuscripts are preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. For further information see the entry at HistoryofInformation.com at this link.

First printed edition of the gynecological writings attributed to the woman physician, Trota, who is frequently called Trotula after the name of the collection of works with whom she is associated. Trota is said to have taught at Salerno during the 12th century. Trota was the earliest woman physician to write significant medical treatises. Her writings were Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum ("Book on the Conditions of Women"), De curis mulierum ("On Treatments for Women", and De ornatu mulierum ("On Women’s Cosmetics"). "The Trotula was published not because it was still of immediate clinical use to learned physicians (it had been superseded in that role by a variety of other texts in the 15th century), but because it had been newly "discovered" as a witness to empirical medicine by a Strasbourg publisher, Johannes Schottus. Schottus persuaded a physician colleague, Georg Kraut, to edit the Trotula, which Schottus then included in a volume he called Experimentarius medicinae ("Collection of Tried-and-True Remedies of Medicine"), which also included the Physica of Trota of Salerno's near contemporary, Hildegard of Bingen. Kraut, seeing the disorder in the texts, but not recognizing that it was really the work of three separate authors, rearranged the entire work into 61 themed chapters. He also took the liberty of altering the text here and there. As [Monica] Green has noted, "The irony of Kraut's attempt to endow "Trotula" with a single, orderly, fully rationalized text was that, in the process, he was to obscure for the next 400 years the distinctive contributions of the historic woman Trota" (Wikipedia article on Trotula, accessed 08-03-15). 

The “boke of children” is the first work on diseases of children to be written by an Englishman the English language. Phaer enabled Englishmen to read and think of pediatrics in their own language. The edition included Phaer's translation of Jehan Goeurot's The regiment of lyfe, a translation of the Regimen of Salerno, and Phaer's A goodly bryefe treatise of the Pestylence, a treatise on the plague.

See Thomas Phaer and the boke of chyldren (1544) edited by Rick Bowers. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Reniassance Studies, 1999. Digital facsimile of the 1999 edition from the Internet Archive at this link.

Reprint of 1553 edition, edited by A.V. Neale and H.R.E. Wallis, Edinburgh, 1955. Also reprinted in Rühräh (No. 6354).

The first book on birds with clear descriptions of the appearance of individual birds based on the author’s own experiences and observations. Turner attempted to determine those birds named by Aristotle and Pliny; he added notes from his own observations on birds, identifying numerous northern European and English species for the first time. Digital facsimile of the 1544 edition from Google Books at this link. 

Mattioli's translation and commentary on Dioscorides provided much new botanical information. As Mattioli continued to expand the commentary, adding new botanical and pharmacological information, through editions in Latin, the images of plants that the work contained also increased both in number and in size and quality, the largest and finest images appearing in the edition of Venice, 1565. Digital facsimile of the 1565 edition from the Biodiversity Heritage Library at this link.

Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio by Belgian engraver, mathematical and surgical instrument maker, Thomas Geminus (Thomas Lambert or Lambrit) was a slightly abridged version of Vesalius's Epitome illustrated with figures from both the Fabrica and the Epitome re-engraved in copperplate by Geminus. Geminus's work introduced Vesalian anatomy to England, filling an important need by providing a summary view of Vesalius's anatomical discoveries more complete than the Epitome, less bulky and expensive than the Fabrica, and illustrated— via the new medium of copperplate engraving— with a clarity of line impossible even for the highly skilled wood engravers employed by Vesalius. The work was dedicated to Henry VIII, who in 1540 had given assent to an Act uniting Barbers and Surgeons into one Company. In the same year another Act authorized the supply of the cadavers of four executed criminals to the Barber and Surgeons Company for dissection. Geminus undoubtedly intended his book to supply needed information to English surgeons in the spirit of the new legislation. However, Vesalius did not authorize publication of the Compendiosa, and he complained about it bitterly in his China-Root Epistle (1546), so that even though Geminus declared Vesalius's authorship in the headline on leaf A1, the Compendiosa has always been considered the first of the many plagiarisms of Vesalius's anatomical works.

For further details see the entry at HistoryofInformation.com at this link.

 Paré’s first book was his treatise on gunshot wounds. He is one of the greatest of the military surgeons, and is particularly remembered for his abandonment of the practice of cauterization of gunshot wounds with boiling oil, until his time a universal procedure. Digital facsimile BnF Gallica at this link.

This was one of the first attempts at a universal bibliography. Unfortunately the section on medicine (liber xxi) was never published. William Osler used the Bibliotheca universalis as one of the models for his own Bibliotheca Osleriana. He placed Gesner in the most important section (“Bibliotheca prima”), and once remarked:”I am not sure that this fellow should go into ‘Prima’, but I love him so much that I must put him there. Besides, he is the Father of Bibliography”.

A cookbook with recipes to restore the health of convalescents.

The first "real" pharmacopeia to be published. It was recognized as the official pharmacopeia of Nuremberg. Facsimile edition, 1934. Digital facsimile of the 1546 edition from Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main at this link.

In this work on the discovery and therapeutic use of the china root (Smilax china) in the treatment of syphilis, Vesalius described the first attempt to formulate methods of identification of an exotic drug. He also offered physicians means of detecting adulteration of the china root, which was coming into common use.

Vesalius devoted most of the China-Root Epistle to a defense of his anatomical methods and doctrines as described in the Fabrica (1543). The work also contains important autobiographical data, including Vesalius's remarks about his teaching experiences at Pisa, his destruction of some of his early manuscripts (a disgusted reaction to the Fabrica's reception), and information concerning his medical forebears.

Cushing, Bio-bibliography of Vesalius (1943) vii.-1. 1. O'Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (1965) 187-224. 

Though Fracastoro wrote this book more than a century before Leewenhoek invented the microscope, and could only express the theory of contagion in very general terms, this book represents a landmark in the development of ideas that centuries later led to the work of Bassi, Henle, Davaine, Koch, and others. For that reason we have classified Fracastoro as a precursor of foundational theories of infectious disease by microorganisms.

Fracastoro was the first to state the germ theory of infection. He suggested the contagiousness of tuberculosis. Haeser even describes him as the “founder of scientific epidemiology”. This book, which contains one of the first accounts of typhus (pp. 43-44), marks an epoch in the history of medicine, since Fracastorius enunciated in it, perhaps for the first time, the modern doctrine of the specific characters and infectious nature of fevers. He is remembered for his poem on syphilis, but he was also eminent as a physicist, geologist, astronomer, and pathologist. An English translation by W. C. Wright appeared in 1930. 

Smid was one of the first writers on medicine in Scandinavia who was trained in medicine, but according to Stokker, Remedies and rituals: folk medicine in Norway and the new land (2007) p. 111 "had trouble succeeding as a doctor bcause of the public's preference for self-trained healers." He copied some of his text, which may be translated as "Beautiful, merry new herb garden," from Petersen's works and other sources.

This, probably the earliest “modern” work on hygiene, throws some light on the condition of that subject in the 16th century.

Contains selections from the writings of Celsus, Plinius Secundus, Soranus, Apuleius, Barbarus, Musa, Priscianus, Trotula, Macer, Caelius Aurelianus, Marcellus Empiricus, Scribonius Largus, Serenus Samonicus, Strabus Gallus.
Digital facsimile from Google Books at this link.

A much-expanded English translation of Turner’s Libellus (No. 1805). That and the above work mark the beginning of scientific botany in England. They contain the first records of the occurrence of some 238 species of flowering plants, a few of them precisely localized. Reprinted with introduction and bibliography, London, Ray Society, 1965.

This popular guide to health includes the first monograph on dentistry for the layman, encouraging the practice of oral hygiene and simple dental care. The first part of the book deals with the eyes, the second with the teeth proper, and the third with the primary dentition.

First edition of the Greek text of the works of Alexander of Tralles, together with an edition of Rhazes on the plague. Both texts were edited by Jacques Goupil. The work was issued by the distinguished scholar printer, Robert Estienne. Digital facsimile from Bayerische StaatsBibliothek at this link.

The “Antidotarium magnum” by the Byzantine physician Nicolaus Myrepsus. It was the largest strictly pharmaceutical work that had appeared up to the time of its writing (about 1270-1280); it contained more than 2,500 prescriptions or compounds arranged according to purpose. The first section included hundreds of antidotes, presumably for poisons. This edition was edited, annotated, and translated from the Greek by Leonhart Fuchs. Digital facsimile from Google Books at this link.

Paré’s revival of podalic version repopularized the procedure, which had been described by Soranus of Ephesus (No. 6008). English translation in The Workes of Ambroise Parey [sic], London, 1634. Digital facsimile of the 1550 edition from BnF Gallica at this liink.

The first book devoted entirely to brain disorders, including tremor, tetanus, vertigo, epilepsy and hemicrania.

The first Spanish medical book based on the writings of Vesalius, written by Vesalius’s student Pedro Jimeno, whose activities “constituted the cornerstone of the Valencian School of Anatomy and the Spanish Vesalian movement” (López Piñero). Dialogus de re medica was the first text on anatomy after Vesalius’s own De humani corporis fabrica (1543) to incorporate the new morphology completely. It is a succinct summary of Vesalius’s work (occasional sentences are quoted literally), but it also expounds the results of Jimeno’s own research: for example, it includes the first printed description of the stapes, in the middle ear. (My thanks to Richard Ramer for this entry.) Digital facsimile from the Internet Archive at this link.