The manuscript contains a collection of medical texts by Galen and is formed of two parts, united by their former owner, the physician John Caius (1510-1573).

Part I contains two works by Galen on physiology and anatomy, On the elements according to Hippocrates ( De elementis secundum Hippocratem), on the theory of the elements, On the natural faculties ( De naturalibus facultatibus).

Part II contains a part of another work by Galen, Method of Healing, books 7-14 ( De methodo medendi). As John Caius indicated in a note in the upper margin of p. 2:161, the portion of the text contained in MS 360/587 completes another of his manuscripts, Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, 47/24 (part I), where the text was written by another scribe, Georgios Tzangaropoulos: these two copies did not belong together. Apparently, as indicated by notes written by John Caius in the margins of a printed edition of Galen (Eton College, Fc.2.6-8, on this see Nutton 1987, p. 65), he had for some time an imperfect copy of this text of Galen (MS Gonville and Caius 47/24), hence the need to have a complete copy of the work. Nutton (1987, p. 65) assumed that the copy of the second part of the text was commissioned by John Caius. This assumption seems to be reinforced by the fact that the text in MS 360/587 begins on the top of a leaf exactly from the point where it ends in MS 47/24, that the pagination carries on from that mauscript, and that the hand of the scribe of MS 360/587 (hand C) recurs also in the margins of MS 47/24 (hand a). The only difficulty in this reconstruction is the fact that the watermarks found in the second part of MS 360/587, although not identified in the repertoires, are comparable with examples dated between the last decade of the 15th and the first quarter of the 16th c., which would be a little early for a copy commissioned by Caius (1510-1573). The scribe could have used an "old" stock of paper; or maybe the watermarks, which are only "comparable" to the examples of the beginnig of the century, are in reality later; the question needs more research.

The manuscript was donated to Gonville and Caius College Library by John Caius (1510-1573), the English physician and second founder of the College. He travelled in Italy from 1539-1544, where he consulted various manuscripts (see S. Berlier, John Caius et le De usu partium. Contribution à l'histoire du texte de Galien, in: Revue d'Histoire des Textes n.s. 6 (2011), pp. 1-14: pp. 5-6) and probably acquired at least some of the Greek manuscripts he later bequeathed to the College.

Dr Erik

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