Joannes de Ketham, Fasciculus medicinae, Venice: Johannes and Gregorius de Gregoriis, 1500, diii verso, woodcut, leaf height 31.4 cm, Inc.3.B.3.45[1519].

This compilation of medical texts (on uroscopy, phlebotomy, gynecology, surgery, plague and anatomy) was well known by the end of the fourteenth century, but is associated with the name of Johannes Kellner von Kirchheim (c. 1420-1468), a professor of medicine at Vienna. The Bundle of medicine was first published by the de Gregoriis brothers in Venice in 1491 with six woodcuts but without the one of the dissection lecture. The 1493 Italian edition included four additional woodcuts including one of a dissection lecture, with a professor reading a book aloft on a chair at the back, the barber about to cut open the body and to the right, a person pointing (called the ostensor) to the body with a stick. This woodcut in some copies of this edition was coloured with stencils.

The 1500 edition at Cambridge uses woodcuts from the 1495 edition that are different from the 1493 edition. While the general composition remains the same, some details have been altered, in particular the right-hand figure at the table has lost the stick and thus less clearly indicates the tripartite division between cutting, reading and pointing in a dissection lecture.

This woodcut appears in the section on Mondino de’ Luzzi’s (c. 1275-1326) Anatomia, a concise description of human anatomy that remained a standard university text for two centuries. The Ketham woodcut appears to the reflect standard practice of the time at the University of Padua that stipulated an annual dissection lesson for the edification of medical students.