The Rare First German Edition of One of the Great Renaissance Surgical Manuals with 22 Woodcuts, Several by Jost Amman after Vesalius

Tagault, Jean and Jacques Houllier. Gründtliche vnd rechte Underweysung der Chirurgiæ oder Wundartzney: Nemlich/ Von allerley Apostemen/ Peulen vnd Geschwulsten. Item/ Von allen frischen Wunden / vnd alten offenen Schäden… Frankfurt am Main, [Georg Rab the Elder and Sigmund Feyerabend], 1574.

One of the great illustrated surgical books of the Renaissance and the rare first German edition of Jean Tagault’s celebrated manual of surgery, printed in Frankfurt in 1574 and illustrated with 22 striking woodcuts, several designed by Jost Amman and others derived from Andreas Vesalius’ revolutionary anatomical imagery.

The work offers an unflinching view into sixteenth-century medicine: amputations, trepanations, battlefield wounds, fractures, surgical instruments, poisoned bites, gunshot injuries, and anatomical studies rendered with extraordinary directness and visual intensity.

Edition & Bibliographic Information

)(6 a6 b8 A-Z6 a-r6 s4 t-v6 x4 = 20 leaves, 244 numbered leaves, 14 leaves (index). Without the errata leaf and likely final blank. Title printed in red and black. Printed with marginal commentary columns throughout; index in double columns.

Illustrated with 22 woodcuts, including two repeats, several signed with the monogram “IA” of Jost Amman, together with three reduced copies after Vesalius’ Tabulae anatomicae. Folio (320 × 200 mm).

Contemporary vellum binding over smooth spine with manuscript title at head and entirely red edges. The volume remains remarkably free from active signs of practical medical use despite occasional faint dampstaining and increasing worming toward the end.

Surgery Before Anesthesia

The title page already announces the brutal scope of the work.

Beneath the extensive printed title appears a dramatic surgical scene in which an amputation is actively underway in the foreground while another patient undergoes cranial trepanation nearby. In the background, wounded and crippled figures move uncertainly through hospital interiors and recovery rooms.

Further illustrations depict shattered limbs, battlefield injuries, invalids, surgical instruments, skeletal studies, fracture devices, and the extraction of bullets from gunshot wounds. Particularly striking is the image of a collapsed cavalier while surgeons attempt to remove the tiny projectile of an arquebusier lodged near the heart.

The imagery captures Europe at the precise moment when warfare, anatomy, and surgery were becoming inseparably linked through the emergence of firearms and increasingly devastating battlefield trauma.

Jean Tagault and Renaissance Medical Humanism

Jean Tagault, professor of surgery and dean of the Paris medical faculty between 1534 and 1537, belonged to the generation of Renaissance physicians who sought to recover and purify ancient medical knowledge through direct engagement with Greek and Latin sources.

Though Tagault’s work drew heavily upon Guy de Chauliac’s medieval Chirurgia magna of 1363, it represented far more than a simple compilation. Renaissance humanist medicine increasingly regarded medieval medical transmission as corrupted through mistranslation, barbarized terminology, and excessive dependence upon later Arabic authorities. Tagault therefore sought to restore clarity by returning directly to Hippocrates, Galen, and classical anatomical language.

The sixth book, devoted to medicines and therapeutic remedies, was prepared by Tagault’s collaborator Jacques Houllier, one of the leading Parisian medical scholars of the age and likewise committed to reviving the relative simplicity of Hippocratic medicine against what humanists increasingly regarded as the overly complicated Galenic-Arabic tradition.

Vesalius and the New Anatomy

Particularly important are the three skeletal illustrations copied after Andreas Vesalius’ Tabulae anatomicae. Their inclusion places the work directly within the great anatomical transformation of the sixteenth century initiated by Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica of 1543.

The Renaissance surgeon increasingly required not merely inherited textual authority, but visual anatomical knowledge grounded in direct observation of the body itself. The woodcuts therefore stand at the intersection of medicine, anatomy, warfare, and print culture.

Jost Amman and Surgical Illustration

Several illustrations bear the monogram “IA” of Jost Amman, among the most important woodcut designers active in late sixteenth-century Germany. His contribution gives the book a remarkable visual coherence and dramatic immediacy.

The hospital interiors, surgical scenes, and wounded bodies possess an almost theatrical intensity, transforming the manual into one of the most visually compelling surgical books of the Renaissance.

The Rare First German Edition

The work first appeared in Latin in Paris in 1543 and went through at least twenty-one further editions by 1645, together with Italian, Dutch, French, and German translations.

The present German translation by Dr. Gregor Zechendorffer — physician in Eger and dedicated to Elector August of Saxony — appeared in 1574, notably before the first French translation of 1580. The edition is today extremely rare.

Literature

Not in Adams; cf. Andresen I, 422f., no. 250; BM STC 848; not in Durling; Gurlt II, 624; Hirsch/Hübotter V, 507; VD16 T 67; Waller 9446.

For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 58a:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume II