TACUINUM SANITATIS - Art Book - Luxury full-colour commentary volume on the illuminated manuscript - Alain Touwaide, Smithsonian Institution - A Medieval Health Treatise

In the late Middle Ages, princes and the powerful learnt the health and hygiene rules of rational medicine from the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a treatise on well-being and health widely disseminated in the 14th and 15th centuries. The treatise was written in Arabic by Ububchasym de Baldach, or Ibn Butlân as he was also known, a Christian physician born in Baghdad and who died in 1068. He sets forth the six elements necessary to maintain daily health and avoid being stressed: food and drink, air and the environment, activity and rest, sleep and wakefulness, secretions and excretions of humours, changes or states of mind (happiness, anger, shame, etc). According to Ibn Butlân, illnesses are the result of changes in the balance of some of these elements, therefore he recommended a life in harmony with nature in order to maintain or recover one’s health. Ibn Butlân’s Taqwin al-sihha were translated into Latin in Palermo, at the court of Manfred, king of Sicily from 1258 to 1266, under the title of Tacuinum Sanitatis. In the late 14th century, in Lombardy, a highly developed series of illustrations was incorporated into this treatise, the starting point for a series of copies that spread beyond Italian frontiers, good evidence of which is this splendid codex made in Renania. Its every folio is illuminated with a miniature and a legend (in Latin, with a subsequent German translation) stating the nature of the element, the characteristics of what is deemed best for human health, its benefits, any harm it may cause and the remedy for such harm. On sale at the confectioner’s, full of coloured vessels and shining glass jars, are delicious pine nuts with a spiced sugar coating, one of the sweets most popular in the Middle Ages. Also on sale are dried fruit and nuts, figs and raisins, particularly the “large raisins from Gerasa” that Ibn Butlân recommended old people eat in winter since “they are effective against intestinal pain, strengthen the liver and the stomach, and if they b