Uroscopy Chart, 1491

Uroscopy Chart, 1491

If diagnosis by uroscopy was supposed to be scientific, the differences in urine needed to be sorted and standardized. The diversity was made manageable by reducing urines to twenty or twenty-one types, identified by color, contents, and consistency. Here, the focus is on colors, each of which is represented by a matula or flask. The color of urine also reflected the predominance of one of the four humors in the examined person; this predominance determined one's "emperament" as (clockwise, from top left) sanguine, choleric, melancholic, or phlegmatic. Finding this kind of diagram helpful in bedside consultations, some practitioners carried a wheel like this to help them in diagnostics. Johannes de Ketham's The Fasiculo de medicina contains six independent and quite different medieval medical treatises. The collection, which existed only in two manuscripts (handwritten copies), was first printed in 1491, in the original Latin with the title, Fasciculus medicinae. The book is remarkable as the first illustrated medical work to appear in print.

Album / NLM/Science Source

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2700 x 4076 px | 31.5 MB

22.9 x 34.5 cm | 9.0 x 13.6 in (300 dpi)