Opera quae supersunt omnia

GEORGIUS PURKIRCHER, Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. Miloslaus Okal, Bibliotheca Scriptorum Medii Recentisque Aevorum, new series, vol. 10, Budapest, Akademiai Kiado, 1988, 8vo, pp. 255, £1 1.00. Despite the existence of substantial biography, written in Hungarian in 1941, Georgius Purkircher (c. 1533-77) has never been a name to conjure with. He is known, if at all, only for a long poem on the anniversary of the death of Melanchthon, his erstwhile teacher at Wittenberg. This new edition ofthe poems and letters of this doctor from Bratislava will, it is hoped, ensure a wider audience for his humanist learning. The medical historian will here find three main topics of interest. Purkircher's Latin poems are filled with medical data. He writes on plague and, in gruesome detail, on the illnesses that carried off friends and family. Secondly, his letters from Padua, where he studied medicine from 1561 until the end of 1563, are full of unusual sidelights on his teachers, his courses, and his life as a student. He comments bitterly on the chaos of 1562-3, when the sudden deaths of Fallopio and Landi in quick succession almost ended medical teaching. Replacements were hard to find, and Professor Trincavelli's failing memory became a student joke. Finally, Purkircher was one of the many medical men with an interest in botany who communicated their findings, seeds as well as ideas, in a network ofcorrespondence that linked Italy with Belgium, and Germany with furthest Hungary. Guilandini, Matthioli, Crato, Clusius, and Camerarius were on familiar terms with Purkircher, who once also acted as a marriage-broker for Hugo Blotius, the historian and librarian of the Imperial court at Vienna. In his own lifetime, then, Purkircher was a far from negligible figure, among European learned physicians as well as in his native Bratislava. This edition of his writings explains why.