The National Library of Medicine's "Turning the Pages" gallery lets you turn the virtual pages of classic science/medicine manuscripts. Check out Hieronymus Brunschwig's Liber de Arte Distillandi de Compositis (1512):
Note that the NLM's copy is hand-colored; uncolored copies also exist, such as this copy at ECHO. Comparison with the images of the ECHO copy show that NLM has elided the boring, text-only pages from their animation.
I'm not usually a big fan of animations that try to replicate the tactile experience of books, but given that you aren't usually allowed to touch manuscripts of this age and rarity anyway, the animation is kind of fun.
Liber de arte distillandi was also featured in the NLM exhibition Harry Potter's World.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The National Library of Medicine just opened a new exhibition, "Harry Potter's World: Renaissance Science, Magic, and Medicine."
"Harry Potter's World" explores the plants, animals, and magic featured in the Harry Potter book series and their roots in Renaissance traditions that played an…
From 1810-11, architect and amateur naturalist George Perry published The Arcana, a lavishly illustrated, serial natural history magazine. Although Perry intended for the serial issues to be assembled by his subscribers into a book, only thirteen complete copies are known to survive today. More…
A very cool addition to the NLM "Turning the Pages" virtual library, which I blogged about back in December: the Edwin Smith surgical papyrus. You literally click and drag to unroll the papyrus, and then toggle the annotations on or off. While it doesn't have the pretty pictures that some of their…
Now that all of you have burned through the 7th Harry Potter book like GWB with an 8-ball of coke in the 70s, what is left for you to do? How to combat that remorseful feeling of being out of such perfectly fluffy literature?
Well here's an open thread to discuss those other series which may…
There are some good laughs in Hooke's _Micrographia_, mostly side-effects of the way the language has changed since the 17th century. Some things that amuse me are the lengthy justifications of basic principles of investigation, the use of words that in present-day English are reserved for the most informal of registers (e.g. Hooke was pretty fond of the adverb "pretty"), and let us not even mention what cork does to its nourifhment on page 115.
ZOMFG!!!!!!!!! That is fucking awesome!!!