19th Century "Trattato di fortificazione e d'artiglieria" (Military Architecture and Artillery treatise)

Another military art jewel, a 19th century rare manuscript about fortifications, bastions and citadels architecture with a treatise about artillery and ballistics, all in one. Written in Italian with elegant calligraphy, has around 30 detailed full page illustrations and starts with an introduction of geometrics (basics rules to erect pentagons, hexagons, heptagons, etc that are used later to design fortifications, most of them by the sea or close to rivers). This manuscript has extraordinary similarities to the other military architecture treatise I posted last October (by Spanish Captain Cristobal de Rojas), named Theory and Practice of Fortifications.

Unfortunately, don’t have author’s name. I’ll update this post if my investigation goes further. I recommend a complete an amazing web page about classical military architecture (forts, arms & armour…): http://www.militaryarchitecture.com/ 

15th Century Medicine treatise (or the importance of urine)

Urine sample color inspection

This manuscript from 15^th century is a compilation about medicine texts.

It has a complete collection about urine characteristics in order to diagnose human diseases, an authentic “medieval urine analysis guideline”. This parameter was one of the most important medical indicator for centuries, as human body was considered sacred for main religions and open surgery was not allowed. There’s a very nice chapter in Noah Gordon best-seller “The Physician” in which Avicena (Abu Ali at Husain Ibn Abdullah Ibn Sina) explains urine importance during a medicine class at the Madraza in Isfahan.

Second extraordinary characteristic for this manuscript is the fact that contains a collection of detailed “wound man” illustrations. This kind of representations, first appeared in European surgical texts during middle ages, laid out schematically the various wounds a warrior or knight might suffer during battles, with accompanying texts stating treatments for the various different injuries.

MaOther examples of “wound man” medical manuscripts are “Fasciculus Medicinae” by Johannes of Ketham (Venice, 1492) and “Fieldbook of wound surgery” by Hans von Gersdorff (Strasbourg in 1519). See some examples (wikipedia) here.

Account of fishes found in river Ganges (19th Century)

This detailed and meticulous compilation of aquatic life in river ganges was issued by Scottish naturist and physician Francis Buchanan-Hamilton (1762-1829) while he was living in India, employed by the British East India Company. With this publication, Francis was describing around 100 unknown species to the scientific community!!. One can imagine Sir Francis Buchanan as the typical multi disciplinary 19th century naturist, having a passionate life exploring unknown and vast extensions, reporting about topography, zoology, history... I can’t avoid thinking in my favorite explorer –and my childhood hero as well-, Percy Fawcett. Hope someday I’ll find material about Sir Fawcett to post in this blog.

Francis Buchanan-Hamilton BIO is available on wikipedia, link here. Article is short, but provides interesting links to The Royal Society or the International Plant Names Index (forgot to mention that he also developed an intense activity regarding botanic science). The other important note in this post is about the virtual library where I found this "Account of fishes found in river Ganges": the botanicus project. This is the first virtual-library project I see in which the scan process is done via OCR or "digital text recognition", even for manuscripts. This means that once the codex is digitized, navigation via "key words" inside the document or through entire database is available, amazing. The weak point of Botanicus Project is scan quality (pdf resolution is poor). Anyway, I'll come back to the botanicus project for sure!

Updated (October, 26): add some new samples (including the rarest fish I've never seen before, don't think scuba diving in Ganges river is a good option)

1st position for rare fish ranking in Ganges...