PUBLICATION OF SPANISH SCIENTIFIC CLASSIC WORKS

As regards the translation, study and publication of the classical authors of the History of Medicine Library and Museum, different projects have been undertaken depending on the finance available at any given time. The Historia de la Ciencia y Documentación Institute has always considered this to be a main activity, and dedicated one series of Cuadernos Valencianos de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia to it. Published works include for example, Oración inaugural sobre la importancia de la Anatomía y la Cirugía by A. Gimbernat; Dialogus del paracelsista Llorenç Cozar; Clasicos españoles de la anatomía patológica; Clásicos españoles de la anestesiología; etc.

A collection of Spanish scientific classics (Hispaniae Scientia) was begun in the 1970's with private funding. Other works published include Concepto, método y programa de anatomía descriptiva y general by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, and Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (1590) by José de Acosta.

Between the late 1980's and the early 1990's an ambitious plan was undertaken in conjunction with the Spanish Ministry of Health and Consumer Affairs, to publish the Spanish classics of public health together with studies of the history of medicine about them. Highly noteworthy volumes appeared such as those on Mateo Seoane, Francisco Méndez Alvaro, Juan Manuel de Aréjula, etc, studies on tuberculosis in restoration-period Spain, medico-social studies of deprived sectors of society in nineteenth-century Spain, etc. The entire collection would have comprised thirty volumes but its publication was interrupted.

In addition, a microfilm edition of 132 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century classics from the History of Medicine Library and Museum was undertaken in the 1980's for the use of specialist libraries.

Within the framework of this project, the result of collaboration between the Marcelino Botín Foundation and the University of Valencia, the publication of the following classics is envisaged:

• Verdadera medicina, cirugia, y astrologia, en tres libros dividida..., Mexico, Fernando Balli, 1607, by Juan de Barrios, edited by José María López Piñero, Head of the History of Science Chair (retired).
• Discurso de las cosas Aromáticas, arboles y frutales, y de otras muchas medicinas simples que se traen de la India Oriental, y sirven al uso de la medicina, Madrid, in the home of Francisco Sanchez, 1572, by Juan Fragoso, edited by José L. Fresquet, history of science professor, University of Valencia.
  Juan Fragoso was a noteworthy, sixteenth-century surgeon who published several works on both subjects. "Discurso de las cosas..." is a text which, despite its title, describes several medicinal products that originated in the east and some fifty more from America. It is perhaps the earliest text to clarify the confusion that existed at that time between oriental "peppers" and American "capsicum".
• Sumario breve de la práctica de la Arithmetica by Juan Andrés (Valencia, Juan Joffre, 1515). This is the first arithmetic book printed in Valencia. It is interesting in several respects because it deals with both the social legitimisation of a discipline with an obviously mercantile utility and the fact that it initiates a line of contents and structure to be taken up by the majority of subsequent treatises. To be edited by Vicente Salavert Fabiani, history of science professor, University of Valencia.
• Timón de tratantes by Juan de Timoneda (Valencia, Pedro Huete, 1575). This fifteen-page pamphlet is appealing on two accounts. Firstly the personality of the author, better known as a playwright and bookseller than arithmetician. Secondly for its contents, a series of conversion tables often used at that time as a work instrument to facilitate business transactions. To be edited by Vicente Salavert Fabiani, history of science professor, University of Valencia.
• Avisos del Parnaso by Juan Bautista Corachán, Valencia, 1747. Corachán was one of the most outstanding leaders of the group of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century innovators who planned a systematic programme to introduce modern science into Spain. This extant manuscript was written by its author in Spanish in 1690, and published in 1747 by Gregorio Mayans at the Academia Valenciana. Its main purpose was to disseminate different aspects of new, scientific tendencies. It includes an excerpt of Descartes' Discours de la méthode in Spanish (the first translation of Descartes in Spain). The Avisos were a series of meetings of philosophers and scientists held in a parnassus on different days to conduct different experiments and debate on different scientific and philosophical matters. The reference to the "Casa de Salomón" and the Royal Society, to which Corachán dedicates an "Aviso", must be seen in the context of the Valencian innovators' projects to create a scientific academy or society.
• Física Moderna Racional y Experimental by Andrés Piquer y Arrufat, Valencia, 1745.
  Piquer was one of the most outstanding figures of eighteenth-century medicine. He taught in Valencia from 1742 to 1751 and was one of the authors who continued the innovators' efforts to introduce and disseminate modern science. His Física was one of the earliest texts published in Spain with this title in Spanish and from the viewpoint of the new philosophic and scientific trends. In general, Piquer subscribes to the premises of mechanism, despite supporting doctrinal eclecticism, and describes the doctrines of Gassendi and Newton, in addition to those of Descartes. One of the works he used as a basis was Elementa Chemiae (1732) by Boerhaave, particularly when studying the elements. This work is in general a good example of the efforts made by Piquer and other contemporary physicians and scientists to modernise university teaching. To be edited, like the previous work, by Vicente Salavert Fabiani, a history of science professor at the University of Valencia.
• Anthology: The plague as seen by three sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish authors.
  Reasoned thinking is one of the basic problems in the development of medicine. The considerable number of treatises about the plague in the 16th and 17th centuries makes it possible to follow one of its main aspects - the introduction of the Fracastoro seminar theory as an explanation of infection as opposed to the theory that the plague was caused by a miasma - and how it spread through Spain.
  Three representative texts written by Juan Bautista Porcell, Alonso de Freylas and Luis Mercado are to be selected. To be edited by María José Báguena Cervellera, a history of science professor at the University of Valencia.
• An Anthology of 16th and 17th-century Spanish texts on surgery. A selection is to be made of Spanish texts on surgery that offer a representative sample of the innovations in academic realms, hospital experience, and wartime surgery in that period. It is also to include a description of new ailments, eg wounds caused by shock waves, plus new in-sights into treating wounds, particularly bullet wounds, by surgery and also, the new clinical and scientific habits such as the incipient hospital statistics and the incorporation of the experience of surgeons, such as observatio, into pathography. Innovative Spanish surgeons held in very high professional and scientific esteem in all these realms included Dionisio Daza Chacón, Francisco Díaz, Bartolomé Hidalgo de Agüero and Juan Fragoso. Less well known but equally noteworthy contributions to this field that could be included in the selection, include those of Francisco Martínez del Castrillo, dentist to Philip II, who wrote one of the earliest, if not the first, European treatise on odontology. It was in some of these works that medical terminology stemming from the medical humanism of that period was coined in Castilian Spanish, a process loaded with a pride and emotion still conveyed by these texts today but which was interrupted in Spain in the 17th century, unlike what occurred in other modern European languages. To be edited by Carla Pilar Aguirre Marco, a history of science professor at the University of Valencia.
• Aviso de Sanidad by Francisco Núñez de Oria, published in Madrid by Pierres Cussin in 1575. Although little is known about the biography of this author, this book is undoubtedly one of the most important "Regimina Sanitatis" published in Renaissance Spain. The first section of the work provides a detailed analysis of all the foodstuffs consumed in that period with exact indications as to the effect each has on health and the healthiest way to eat them. The second, much shorter part, entitled "Tratado del uso de la mujeres" (Treatise on the use of women) provides advice on sexual hygiene specifically for men and a series of recommendations about bathing. One of the most noteworthy aspects of this text is the mention of American foodstuffs already eaten at that time in Castile, somewhat unusual in the medical texts of that time about food. To be edited by María Luz López Terrada, a tenured scientist of the Historia de la Ciencia y Documentación López Piñero Institute (CSIC-University of Valencia).