#2 MS10

This item comes from Pembroke’s collection of medical manuscripts. You can see all of them in detail on the Digital Bodleian website

1. This manuscript (MS) is MS10 and is just known as ‘Medica’ in the catalogue.

2. It is made up of 7 manuscripts bound together. The medical texts are first, and a sermon from the 16th century has been added to the end.

3. The medical texts date from the mid-12th century, to the mid-13th.

4. They are on parchment, and were written in France and Germany as well as England.

5. The book is fairly small, measuring 228 by 170mm.

6. It seems most likely that the manuscript was in England before 1300.

7. Although we cannot be sure, this and our other medical manuscripts most likely belonged to the first Master of Pembroke, Thomas Clayton, who was Regius Professor of Medicine and a renowned teacher and scholar of medicine.

8. In one text, the scribe changed his mind after copying just the first chapter of a text, and switched to something completely different!

9. As is common in medieval medical texts, urine colour was a vital diagnostic tool. f.25v tells us that white urine when in a fever is a bad thing. **Disclaimer: this is not twenty-first century medical advice!**

10. f.85 shows a calendar on one side, and a diagram of the brain on the other, indicating the different parts.