Scultetus: Armamentarium Chirurgicum

With his Armamentarium Chirurgicum, the Ulm city physician, anatomist, and surgeon Johannes Scultetus (1595–1645) made a significant contribution to the European medical history of the modern era. The work contains informative descriptions of contemporary surgical instruments and their use, making it the oldest known textbook on surgery that presents common surgical procedures and instruments encyclopedically in both text and images. Some of the fascinating instruments were even inventions of the author himself, who was educated in Italy, and were intended to enable faster and more precise surgical procedures. The text also includes a collection of around 300 recipes for the drug treatment of diseases and general advice for physical well-being. Scultetus wrote the groundbreaking textbook shortly before his death and left his unpublished manuscript to his nephew Johannes. The latter finalized the work and had it printed for the first time in 1653. The second edition of the Latin work presented here was published by Balthasar Kühne with 43 copperplate engravings by the Ulm city painter Jonas Arnold the Younge, which artistically and strikingly illustrate surgical instruments and procedures.