Das 'Circa Instans'. Die erste große Drogenkunde des Abendlandes (Grüne Reihe - Schriften zur antiken und mittelalterlichen Medizin- und Pharmaziegeschichte)

Circa instans translates “About some recent” – as far as book titles go this is about as uninformative as it can get. But since ancient and medieval books often had no titles at all – and the titles under which they run are usually later unimaginative inventions – one way of referring unambiguously to these works is to quote the “incipit”, i.e. the word(s) the book opens with. Thus the book here under review starts with “Circa instans …”. Another problem often encountered with ancient and medieval books is the question of authorship, and this book is no different. There are some possible clues that he was a scion of the Platearii, a family of physicians who graced the halls of an institution in Salerno a century or two before and after the turn of the first millennium, an institution that is often called’ the first European university’. Circa instans is thought to have been composed between 1130-1150. What “recent” matters was this Platearius- if Platerarius he was - going on about? In fact it is “About some recent problems with medicinal simples drugs”. The art of medicine at the time was in some chaos since many of the inherited names were no longer understood and new expensive drugs from Asia, sometimes rumoured to be panacea, had reentered the European market and were often fraudulently contaminated with god-knows-what. Circa instans can be seen as the prototype of the modern pharmacopoeia that no longer regurgitated ancient compilations but tried to set standards in nomenclature and other aspects like purity and to offer factually accurate new information about composition and effectiveness without any fanciness and superstition. For the next three hundred years Circa instans was the basic text book upon which others could and did build. However, after this early bloom the book – although not totally forgotten – sank into near neglect and the Renaissance printers did not bother much about publishing it but preferred printing herbals with illustrations rather than some dry descriptive work.Unfortunately this near neglect continued for another 400 years before a modern edition saw the light of day as late as in 1939, not in the shape of a scientific volume published by a well-bespoke publishing house but in the humble form of a German doctoral thesis, submitted by a Hans Wölfel in Berlin. This meant that the work had only the tiniest print-run and with copies only available in certain German university libraries. Now Wölfel was an “Apotheker” {i.e. dispensing chemist) by trade, which is helpful for the pharmaceutical aspects but he was no trained scholar of medieval Latin. His text, mainly based on the Erlangen manuscript 674, shows due to his background a number of infelicitous readings but this should not detract from the fact that this was the first modern transcription available to the historian of medicine and the scientific community thanked him by making it possibly the most photocopied German doctoral thesis in history.We had to wait for another 76 years before a revised transcription has become available, now by Konrad Goehl. There are several clear advantages this edition has over Wölfel’s.- Goehl is a trained “Altphilologe” with decades of experience and a long list of pertinent publications to his credit who went over the Erlangen and other manuscripts again incorporating Wölfel’s findings correcting him and adding further witnesses.- As Konrad himself says, this is not a fully critical edition since the early popularity of Circa instans has left a legacy of more than 200 manuscripts to be consulted and collated, a gigantic task best done by a team of scholars, but Goehl’s commented transcription is the most reliable and quotable text under the circumstances.- Even if you do not read German it is now possible to have the improved Latin text of this ground-breaking work.- Goehl added a modern German translation of the full text, the first of its kind. As far as I know there is no modern English translation in existence at this time. Now Konrad has the rare talent of being able to manoeuvre two conflicting requirements in a translation: closeness to the original and clarity and transparency in the translated text. His translation is lucid, nowhere verbose but strict and to the point, avoiding any fudging but fluent and perfectly readable. I believe there are few among us who can reach this high standard.- To add to these achievements this book is now available on the market published by the respectable Deutscher Wissenschafts-Verlag Baden-Baden in beautiful print on high-gloss paper. Had this book been snapped up by some other scientific publishing houses the price for a copy would have forced many readers to remortgage their houses, but this book is priced at 39.95 euros, an astonishingly low price, I believe that my procuring of a photocopy of Wölfel’s “Doktorarbeit” cost me a lot more than that.This book constitutes real progress in Circa instans research and history of medicine in general. I cannot but recommend it in the highest possible terms.

Ich habe das Buch gekauft, da ich einen Roman schreibe, der im Mittelalter spielt. Da es in meiner Geschichte auch um Apotheken zu dieser Zeit geht, dachte ich durch das Buch mehr Wissen über Rezepturen zu erhalten. Ein bisschen geholfen hat es. Nur für meine Zwecke war der Preis dann doch viel zu hoch.

Das Buch war als gebraucht deklariert. Es kam eingeschweißt an und es war somit Neuware ohne Makel. Von mir 5 Sterne!