GUILLEMEAU, Jacques.

The third and most complete of the collected editions of Jacques Guillemeau’s medical works issued during his lifetime, bringing together in one volume all of his previously published works.

Jacques Guillemeau (1550 – 1612) was born in Orléans into a family of surgeons and studied surgery under Riolan, Courtin, and Ambroise Paré. Guillemeau was not only a student but also a friend of Paré, as his affectionate dedication in his Traité des maladies de l’oeil (1585) demonstrates: ‘je desirerois faire cognoistre à un chacun, combien ie vous estois redevable, pour avoir esté l’espace de huict ans endoctriné en vostre maison’. Paré also took him as an assistant on several military campaigns, and he spent four years with the Spanish army in Flanders. Returning to Paris in 1581 to work as a doctor, Guillemeau became noted as a surgeon and served as surgeon-in-ordinary to three French kings (Charles IX, Henry III and Henri IV).

After a prefatory section on the history, development, and excellence of anatomical science, Les Oeuvres begins by re-offering Guillemeau’s Tables anatomiques (1586). The first part of this work consists of a methodical division of all the parts of the human body into the bones, the stomach, the circulatory system, the thorax, the head, the nervous system and the musculatory system. These large-scale divisions are refined into subsections and illustrated by numerous anatomical tables, each facing a leaf of explanatory text keyed to the table by means of alphabetical letters. The second part is devoted to pathology and analyses the various illnesses which afflict each part of the body.

Following this section there is a long treatise on childbirth and neonatal care which consists of Guillemeau’s writings on obstetrics, including his De l’heureux accouchement des femmes (1609), the ‘actual source of the so–called “Mauriceau” manoeuvre’ (Garrison-Morton 6145.1), and his De la nourriture et gouvernement des enfants (1609). Then, beginning on page 497, we find Guillemeau’s La Chirurgie française, which first appeared in 1594. “The Chirurgie announces itself as an illustrated catalogue of all the principal surgical instruments of its time […] It includes quite detailed descriptions of the instruments shown in its engraved plates but it also has a number of chapters of text describing some of the operations in which they were used” (Donaldson 375). The penultimate section, beginning on page 735, concerns the illnesses of an eye and is in fact Guillemeau’s Traité des maladies de l’œil (1585) which had been the ‘first French work on ophthalmology’ (Garrison-Morton 5818). Guillemeau’s collected works concludes with a brief treatise on the plague and how best to protect oneself from it.

In the present copy, the general title-page of the Oeuvres has been replaced with the title-pages of two of the works which constitute it, Guillemeau’s La chirurgie françoise (1594) and his Tables anatomiques (1586), possibly because the general title was not yet ready – it was published two years after the others. The title-page of La chirurgie françoise is remarkable and one can understand the wish to preserve it – it displays examples of surgical procedures in each of its six panels. “The top panel is labelled chirurgia quam citissime administranda, ‘surgery that must be carried out as soon as possible’ – emergency surgery. This panel shows, on the right, treatment of a skull fracture by trepanning and, on the left, among other injuries, the removal of an arquebus ball from the thigh using an instrument specially designed for the purpose. In the centre-left panel is an illustration of bloodletting; on the centre-right, one showing couching of a cataract. At the bottom we have amputation of a leg and an arm on the left and reduction of a dislocation of the shoulder and treatment of a fracture of the leg on the right.” (Donaldson 376).