In 1970, Editions Medicina Rara Ltd. published a sumptuous facsimile edition of Johannes Scultetus’ seminal work, Armamentarium Chirurgicum, bringing a cornerstone of seventeenth-century surgical literature to modern bibliophiles and medical historians . Scultetus, one of the most renowned German surgeons of his era, compiled this comprehensive catalogue of surgical instruments and procedures, which was published posthumously in 1655 from his notes by his nephew . The work quickly became the most popular surgical text of the seventeenth century, detailing techniques both pioneered and practiced by Scultetus himself, including methods of trephination, amputation, lithotomy, and wound repair .
The Medicina Rara edition was a production of extraordinary care and craftsmanship. Limited to twenty-eight hundred copies, the facsimile was printed at the presses of Druckerei Holzer in Weiler im Allgäu, West Germany, on a specially manufactured rag paper bearing the private watermark of Medicina Rara . The plates were meticulously reproduced from two original copies of the 1655 Ulm edition, one from the Leopold Sophien Bibliothek Überlingen and the other from the Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart . The complete work contains the forty-three engraved plates that made the original so distinctive, depicting surgical instruments and procedures in remarkable detail .
Of the total edition, three hundred copies received a deluxe binding of three-quarter leather with French marbled paper boards, numbered in Roman numerals I-CCC . The remaining twenty-five hundred copies were bound in half leather and Hahnemühle paper, numbered in Arabic numerals 1-2500 . Housed in matching slipcases, these facsimiles preserve the monumental folio format of the original, measuring approximately 36 centimeters in height . For collectors and scholars, this edition represents a faithful reproduction of a work that Garrison-Morton describes as the most popular surgical text of its century, containing one hundred case reports and illustrations that document the full scope of surgical practice in Scultetus’ time .
