16th Century book of medical remedies published online
The Jesuatti Book of Remedies is a compilation of medical remedies that the friars of the Order of Saint Jerome used to cure the sick and to care for the human body in the 16th Century and earlier. Compiled sometime before 1562 by friar Giovanni Andrea from Brescia, Italy, the Center for Digital Scholarship has made this text available electronically using a variety of open standards and electronic publishing technologies.
The handwritten manuscript, which also contains numerous drawings, is preserved in the rare book collection of the Kenneth Spencer Research Library of the University of Kansas.
Library staff created hi-resolution scans of each page from the original manuscript. The work was transcribed, translated into English, and notated by Stata Norton, Emeritus Professor, Department of Pharmacology, Toxicology and Therapeutics, University of Kansas Medical Center.
The text, along with Professor Norton’s preface, footnotes, and glossary of plants, animals, and minerals was marked up according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup guidelines for digital texts.
Together, the images and text are made available on the web using eXtensible Text Framework (XTF), an open source publishing application developed by the University of California Digital Library.
Planned enhancements to the online edition inlcude adding links to the high-resolution versions of all scanned page images, and adding the transcription of the original Italian text.
To learn more about the significance of this and similar manuscripts, see Dr. Norton’s article The Origins of Pharmacology in the 16th Century.
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