Details

STOCKER, Johannes, of Ulm. Praxis Aurea [the collected Praxis Morborum Particularium], in the recension of Adrian Toll. Third edition. Duodecimo. [9] leaves, 361 pp., [1] leaf (as called for). This copy lacking the title-leaf, the text commencing at signature “A”. Bound in old blind-tooled calf with its original leather ties.

Johannes Stocker (c. 1454–1513) of Ulm studied at Ingolstadt and took his doctorate in medicine at Bologna before returning, in 1484, to serve as city physician of the free imperial city of Ulm — the office held before him by the humanist Heinrich Steinhöwel. He attended south-German nobility and prelates, corresponded with Johannes Reuchlin, and stood among the notable physicians of Renaissance Ulm.

The amalgam passage

The work’s enduring importance is a single, remarkable passage, and it is present in this copy. The chapter itself declares the context before the recipe is reached: at p. 129, Cap. XIX — De Dolore Dentium, & Dentibus perforatis (“On toothache, and on perforated teeth”). Four pages of remedies follow — hops in vinegar, oak leaves, colocynth after Mesue, ragwort root, garlic with frankincense, the Experimentum Divi Imperatoris — and then, at the foot of p. 132 under the rubric Ad dentes perforatos, running over to p. 133:

“Fac canalem de auro fino, & per canalem cauterizetur dens cum alio auro usque ad mortificationem radicis dentis, postea imple foramen cum Amalgama, facta ex Vitriolo, & Mercurio, ita ut sequitur. ℞ vitrioli, & dissolue cum aceto forti in patella, adde Mercurii quantumvis. Deinde decoquatur, & convertetur Mercurius in Amalgama, & illud Amalgama pone in foramen dentis, & durescit sicut lapis, & valet in omni foramine.”

“Make a tube of fine gold, and through the tube let the tooth be cauterised with more gold until the root of the tooth is deadened; then fill the cavity with an amalgam made of vitriol and mercury, thus: take vitriol and dissolve it with strong vinegar in a pan, add as much mercury as you wish. Then let it be boiled, and the mercury will be turned into an amalgam; and place that amalgam in the cavity of the tooth, and it hardens like stone, and it serves for every cavity.”

It is not merely a filling material but a complete operative sequence — a gold cannula, cauterisation of the pulp through it, then the amalgam restoration — and it is what scholarship records as the earliest known Western prescription for filling a tooth with amalgam. Since Stocker died in 1513, the prescription originates fully a century before the printed text offered here.

Toll’s apparatus is keyed to this very chapter. The printed note-letter c on p. 132 attaches to Lap. Magn. — lodestone as an ingredient in the preceding mouthwash — and note c on p. 133 opens a long commentary on the magnet that runs to p. 137, marshalling Dioscorides, Pliny, Galen, Agricola, Boëtius de Boodt, Gesner, Cardano, Scaliger, Clusius, Cesalpinus, Camerarius and Paré, and citing at p. 137 “Gilbertus quidam Anglus totum librum de magnete scripsit” — William Gilbert’s De Magnete — together with Fabricius Hildanus’s celebrated case of a steel splinter drawn from a peasant’s cornea by lodestone. A practical medical handbook engaging with the founding text of magnetism half a century after its publication.

Stocker was a physician of markedly rational cast: his pupil and successor Wolfgang Reichart records that when a peasant’s uncanny singing convinced villagers he was possessed — they stood ready to cart him off for exorcism — Stocker explained from medical philosophy that melancholics may utter prophecies and strange tongues through natural disease, not through any demon.

Edition and collation

Although this copy lacks its title-leaf, the edition is fixed with confidence by its collation. The work appeared in three editions — Frankfurt 1609 (first; 236 pp., octavo), Leiden 1634 (second; small octavo), and Leiden 1657 (third; 361 pp., duodecimo). The present copy’s 361-page duodecimo collation matches the third edition of 1657 exactly (union-catalogue records, K10plus / VD17).

What sets this edition apart is textual, not merely bibliographic. Stocker’s casebook first appeared in 1609 (Frankfurt) as the bare Praxis morborum particularium, printed from his posthumous papers; in 1634 the Leiden physician Adrian Toll (Adrianus Tollius, d. 1635) re-edited it, furnished it with running commentaries, and gave it the title it now bears — Praxis Aurea. The present 1657 is Toll’s recension in its final, enlarged-and-corrected state (“editio tertia, auctior et emendatior”) — the fullest form the text ever attained.

It is genuinely scarce. Across all three editions WorldCat locates the work in only some nineteen libraries worldwide; the 1657 third edition itself is recorded in the K10plus union catalogue in just three — the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek at Weimar, and the Marienbibliothek Halle (OCLC 831622215). It is uncommon in commerce as well: across Rare Book Hub’s archive of more than sixteen million auction records, Stocker’s Praxis surfaces only three times — Hodgson & Co. in 1960, the 1634 second edition at Catawiki in 2024, and once within a group lot at Bonhams in 2025 — none identifiable as the 1657 third edition, and none presently offered in the trade but modern print-on-demand reproductions.

Literature

Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon. Das Mittelalter, Bd. 7 (De Gruyter), s.v. “Stocker, Johannes” (Bausewein); Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, Bd. 9; Neue Deutsche Biographie 25 (2013), G. Keil, “Stocker (Stockar), Hans”; union catalogues K10plus / VD17 and WorldCat (OCLC 831622215); W. Hoffmann-Axthelm, Die Geschichte der Zahnmedizin; M. Straub, J. Stocker, “Ad dolorem dentium” (Diss. Tübingen); W. Ludwig, on Wolfgang Reichart (Medizinhistorisches Journal 32, 1997); B. D. Haage & W. Wegner, Deutsche Fachliteratur der Artes in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit.

Provenance

From the significant antiquarian library of Monreith House, Wigtownshire — ancient seat of the Maxwells of Monreith (Clan Maxwell) — assembled by Sir Herbert Maxwell, 7th Bt. (1845–1937) and his father: MP, Fellow of the Royal Society, Knight of the Thistle, President of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Chairman of the National Library of Scotland, and author of some sixty books; grandfather of the naturalist Gavin Maxwell, of Ring of Bright Water. A manuscript shelfmark “K6” at the head of the first leaf.

An early reader at work. The toothache chapter carries contemporary manuscript crosses in the margins — three against remedies on p. 130 and one on p. 131 — the marks of a reader going through the chapter and noting what he meant to use. On a practical handbook of this kind, such marks are the evidence that the book was consulted rather than shelved.

Condition

Old blind-tooled calf with its original leather ties, rubbed and worn but firm and sound. Lacking the title-leaf, the text beginning at signature A with the divisional title (“Ioh. Stockeri … Praxeos Liber Primus. Caput Primum. De Dolore Capitis”). Otherwise complete to the end — the text runs through to its alphabetical index and “FINIS” beneath the printer’s foliate tailpiece — with light age-toning throughout and some marginal fraying and chipping to a few leaves. Further photographs and a full condition report gladly supplied on request.

The earliest known Western prescription for filling a tooth with amalgam: Stocker’s Praxis, in old calf with its leather ties.

Atelier Zweig · Item AZ-STOCKER-1657