medical books published in bruges Ludo Vandamme
Books are a mirror of society. In this essay, we offer a brief survey of the books produced by the medical world in Bruges in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Without seeking to be exhaustive, we look in turn at medical astrology, work by surgeons and physicians, and government publications. The focus is on both the work of locally based authors and the medical output of printer-publishers. The publishing business in Bruges was modest in the centuries in question and so authors in the city frequently entrusted their texts to printers in Antwerp or abroad. Sixteenth-century book production in the Low Countries was recently estimated at about 30,000 editions, of which Bruges can lay claim to barely a hundred. The situation did not differ much in the seventeenth century. Almanacs and astrological forecasts were the tool par excellence of practical medicine. The astrological calendar was crucial to surgeons when it came to performing (pseudo-)medical procedures like bleeding, cupping and administering medication. It is quite possible that almanacs were published each year in Bruges in
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the final quarter of the fifteenth century, but no such material has survived. All we know is that Colard Mansion – a printer who was active in Bruges between 1476 and 1483 – published an almanac in French for the year 1478. Fragments of a copy turned up in the nineteenth century, but subsequently disappeared again without trace. Bruges physicians were particularly assiduous in composing astrological forecasts in the sixteenth century. Pieter Bruhesius (died 1571), the municipal physician, was responsible for the official almanac, which other local physicians like François Rapaert (died 1587) and Cornelis Schuute (died 1580) condemned as unscientific. Rapaert responded with his own eeuwigen almanach (‘perpetual almanac’, 1551), while Schuute championed the annual forecasts that he published himself. Whatever the case, doctors in Bruges did not have their forecasts published – whether in broadsheet or book form – in their own city, but in Antwerp. It was not until well into the seventeenth century that regular almanac production got under way in Bruges.
The earliest surviving example – and another one-off – is the Oprechten Vlaemschen tydtwyser (‘Honest Flemish Almanac’) for 1683. The medical instructions are still there, although the compiler is no longer a physician but a mathematician. Surgeons were firmly rooted in practice, and so their publications take the form of training manuals and concrete guidelines on dealing with epidemics in the city. One excellent surgical manual is Examen chirurgorum by Jan Pelsers (died 1581). He also addressed his fellow practitioners – chirurgienen ende barbiers – in the vernacular. That book was published in 1565 by Hubertus Goltzius’s private press: part of a humanist circle in which Pelsers clearly felt at home. A new edition subsequently appeared in the Northern Netherlands in the seventeenth century (Fig. 15). Pelsers drew on his many years of expertise as a ‘plague master’ in Bruges for his volume Van de Peste (‘On Plague’), which Pieter de Clerck published in 1569. The plague books of the
