Organs of the abdomen

Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, Ms 190/223, 5 recto.
By permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College

This page of organs removed from the context of the abdomen is one of the nine figures included in the thirteenth-century series of English anatomical illustrations. Each organ is identified by a descriptive word or phrase. The shapes and colouring of the figures are schematic rather than naturalistic. The object of the figure is to provide a guide to the key organs and, in the case of the stomach and liver, to suggest their function within the body.

Peter Murray Jones

For medieval medical manuscripts, see further Jones, Peter Murray (1998), Medieval Medicine in Illuminated Manuscripts (London: British Library), and for other manuscripts in the Cambridge collection, see Binski, Paul and Panayotova, Stella (eds.) (2005), The Cambridge illuminations : ten centuries of book production in the medieval West (London: Harvey Miller).

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