Jean Scultet - L’Arcenal de chirurgie - 1685

THE ARMAMENT OF SURGERY
By Jean Scultet, Doctor and Surgeon of the Republic of Ulmes [Ulm].
Lyon, at Antoine Cellier Fils, rue Mercière, under the Sign of the Constance, 1685.

A small quarto volume [(10) ff. including a titled engraving, 385, (1) pp., (12) ff., 49 plates] bound in full brown calf of the period, spine with raised bands ornamented with gilded compartments and provided with a title-piece in morocco. Head of the binding missing on the back. Wear and losses to corners and tops.

The work opens with a magnificent frontispiece engraved by Tixerant depicting a scene of a surgical operation with numerous instruments hanging on the walls, followed by a title page in red and black. This posthumous edition, revised, corrected and augmented, was translated into French by Messire François Deboze (Doctor of Medicine and sworn surgeon in Lyon) and also contains the description of a human monster exhibited in Lyon on March 5, 1671.

The text is richly illustrated with numerous copperplate engravings hors-texte (tables numbered) detailing with precision the arsenal of surgical instruments of the time, the trepans, the saws, the forceps, the retractors and the operative techniques.

Johannes Scultetus (1595–1645) is the author of this Armamentum Chirurgicum originally published posthumously in 1653. It is one of the most famous and richly illustrated treatises of surgery of the modern era, serving as a fundamental guide for the history of medical instrumentation in the 17th and 18th centuries.