Medical Collections, The Leaves of Life
By University of Aberdeen, Special Libraries and Archives

Kings College, Aberdeen (established 1495), was the first English-speaking university to teach medicine. Thus, the University has been involved in medical teaching and collecting medical books, papers, and material objects for over five hundred years. It has also long been associated with major medical advances and discoveries.

From its beginning, the University taught Medicine as well as Theology, Law and Arts. The Kings College Foundation Book provides for a Doctor in Medicine to have a house and garden and a salary of 12 and six shillings per annum. Significantly, he was to be clothed like the medical doctors of the University of Paris, then the most eminent medical school in northern Europe, in which the first two Mediciners of Aberdeen had their education.

The first principal, Hector Boece, brought with him to Aberdeen a 1494 Paris edition of Marsilio Ficinos De Triplici Vita (Of Threefold Life). This audacious product of Renaissance Florence, the most advanced and speculative medical text of its day, contains a final section on the magical medicine of the ancients. Boeces signature, with his wonderful calligraphic knot floating like a balloon from the initial H, occurs twice on the opening pages and annotates the margins throughout the volume. Later notes on the endpapers confirm that the book passed into the possession of Robert Gray, Mediciner from 1522 to the 1550s.

In his hand we also have notes of medical preparations, such as parsley and camomile being used for the treatment of gallstones. Other 15th century holdings include a 1462 copy of Bernard de Gordons Lilium Medicinae1, medical notes by an Aberdonian student at Paris2, and a 1469 partial manuscript of the great Arabian physician and philosopher Avicennas Canon3, as copied by a Scottish scribe. Among the early donations to the library of Kings College is a magnificent folio of Avicenna, printed at Venice that is, at the confluence of east and west in 1544. The first Scottish medical publication, the 1568 Ane Breve Descriptioun of the Pest (plague), was by the early-modern Aberdonian Mediciner, Gilbert Skene.

The Medical Collections: The Leaves of Life
University of Aberdeen, Special Libraries and Archives
Rar’d 13 page, OCR-Quality pdf 9 MB
2006-02
RAR File-Size: 8.61 MB

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