Jacob Rueff - De Conceptu Et Generatione Hominis - 1580

Jacob Rueff’s Renaissance Obstetrics: The First Jost Amman Illustrated Edition of De conceptu et generatione hominis

MOUSEION CURATOR NOTE

“A title that begins with conception and ends in duty: Rueff’s book is not simply about birth, but about the ordering of birth into knowledge. The womb becomes a visible field; the fetus, a subject of diagrams; and the printed image, a tool of survival. The 1580 Amman edition remains prized in medical bibliography for what Garrison-Morton famously describes as the “first true anatomical pictures in an obstetrics book.”

THE BOOK

RUEFF, Jacob. De conceptu et generatione hominis. De matrice et eius partibus, nec non de conditione infantis in utero, et gravidarum cura et officio…
Frankfurt am Main: Sigmund Feyerabend, for Georg Rab / Corvinus, 1580.

Quarto, 14.5 × 19.5 cm. 4to. a⁴ A–Z⁴ a–b⁴ = 100 leaves; this copy [4], 98 of 100 ff., lacking ff. 44 and 47. Contemporary soft ivory vellum. Illustrated throughout with woodcuts by Jost Amman, including female anatomy, the womb, fetal presentations, childbirth scenes, obstetrical instruments, forceps, conjoined twins, and abnormal births.

First Jost Amman illustrated edition of Rueff’s celebrated obstetrical treatise.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Jacob Rueff’s De conceptu et generatione hominis is one of the defining books in the history of printed obstetrics. Physician and surgeon of Zurich, Rueff was charged with the instruction and examination of midwives, and his book emerged from that civic and medical responsibility. It treats conception, fetal development, the anatomy of the uterus, pregnancy, birth, nursing, maternal and infant care, sterility, miscarriage, uterine disease, difficult delivery, instruments, and monstrous or malformed births. In this respect, the title is exact in its ambition: not merely a manual of childbirth, but a full Renaissance anatomy of human generation.

The work belongs to the tradition inaugurated by Eucharius Rösslin’s Rosengarten, yet Rueff considerably enlarges the field. Earlier obstetrical books had given counsel; Rueff gives counsel, anatomy, instruments, fetal positions, abnormal presentations, and surgical recourse. The University of Iowa’s Heirs of Hippocrates notes the scope of Rueff’s treatment, from fetal nutrition and parturition to uterine tumors and malformed births, and observes that several woodcuts derive from Rösslin, Ryff, and Vesalius, whom Rueff acknowledges.

The 1580 Frankfurt edition is especially desirable for its visual program by Jost Amman, one of the most prolific and refined German-Swiss designers of the late sixteenth century. Amman’s woodcuts transform Rueff’s medical text into a theatre of obstetrical instruction: the birth stool, the lying-in chamber, fetal positions in utero, gynecological instruments, conjoined twins, and unusual births are presented with a force at once clinical and emblematic. The British Museum records the 1580 Frankfurt edition as illustrated with Amman woodcuts depicting female anatomy, the womb, childbirth scenes, foetuses, forceps and gynecological instruments, conjoined twins, and other birth abnormalities.

The book’s social significance is equally profound. Rueff wrote at a moment when childbirth, traditionally governed by female experience and midwifery practice, was increasingly brought under the observation of male civic physicians, surgeons, and anatomists. Yet the book was not written against the midwife so much as around her: to train, correct, and support her in moments of peril. A later English reception preserved this purpose when Rueff’s work appeared as The Expert Midwife in 1637, explicitly intended for the “generall good and benefit” of the nation and directed toward the dangers of childbirth.

Rueff’s own address, as transmitted in the English tradition, gives the book its most human note: “my labours I bequeath to all grave modest and discreet women,” and to those practicing “physicke or chirurgery,” for use in necessity “both for mother, child and midwife.” Few sentences better capture the book’s double identity: learned, anatomical, and masculine in its printed authority; practical, domestic, and urgent in the world it served.

PROVENANCE

Early inscriptions on the title page. Repeated wet stamps attributed to the early nineteenth century.

CONDITION REPORT

Quarto in contemporary soft ivory vellum. Text incomplete, with 98 of 100 leaves present; lacking leaves 44 and 47. Title soiled, with early inscriptions and repeated old wet stamps. Staining, handling marks, marginal wear, and leaf damage, including loss affecting individual leaves. Binding with age wear consistent with use.

The photographs should be consulted, as they form an integral part of the condition report.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The significance of Rueff’s title lies in its sequence of subjects: conception, generation, the womb, the fetus in utero, and the duty of care owed to pregnant women. It is a programmatic title, setting forth the reproductive body as a field to be known, pictured, ordered, and assisted.

In the history of medicine, this is the world before modern obstetrics but after purely traditional midwifery: a transitional discipline in which anatomy, civic regulation, surgical intervention, and female practice converge. In the history of illustration, the 1580 edition is a landmark because Amman’s images make obstetrics visible as a printed science. In the history of women’s bodies, it is both a document of care and control: a manual intended to reduce danger, but also one that records the increasing authority of learned medicine over childbirth.