Tacuinum Sanitatis - Codex Vienna

Tacuinum Sanitatis - Codex Vienna

Codex Vindobonensis 2396 belongs to the book type known as Tacuinum Sanitatis. The tradition of compiling such health books in tabular form dates back to the Arabic work Taqwim as-sihha by the physician Ibn Butlan (d. ca. 1069), who lived in Baghdad in the mid-11th century. It was likely at the court of King Manfred of Sicily (1258–1266) that a Latin translation was produced from the original Arabic text, leading to the adaptation of the work in the form of the Tacuina Sanitatis in Italy and beyond.

Tables of Health

Ibn Butlan’s original tabular format was structured such that each horizontal row listed “Name, Nature, Better is …, Benefits, Harms, Prevention of Harm, Age, Scholars’ Quotes,” while the vertical columns listed information for usually seven drugs or behaviors—a system that had the advantage of requiring the reader to search for a desired entry in only one column at a time. Originally, these tables were not illuminated, but they merged with the purely pictorial manuscripts—the herbariums of ancient tradition—to form the present new book type.

A Fascinating Health Book from Venice

The Vienna Tacuinum Sanitatis reproduced here is the most comprehensive and systematic example of the genre that has survived to this day. It contains brief, bullet-point-style explanations of 294 materiae medica—that is, plants, animals, processed foods and remedies, as well as other health factors that influence human physical and mental well-being. Each of these health factors is illustrated with its own miniature.

Ancient Teachings for Medieval Daily Life

The medical explanations are based on ancient knowledge, such as that of Plato and Aristotle. It was assumed that a substance is always composed of four elements, which can be compared to the states of matter in modern physics, with different properties attributed to these four elements:

Earth: dry and cold (solid)
Water: wet and cold (liquid)
Air: wet and warm (gaseous)
Fire: dry and hot (plasma-like)

From this concept of the four elements, the theory of the four humors was then derived, in which a disease was viewed as a disturbance of the harmony of the bodily humors, and in which it was the task of healers to restore the “balance of the humors” and thus health. Hippocrates lists the following bodily humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.
Today’s readers of this or other copies of the Tacuinum Sanitatis will encounter here many remedies and methods for a healthy lifestyle that are still used and practiced today, yet whose origins with the “old masters” of the art of healing have long been forgotten.