Gonville and Caius College MS 190/223, fol. 2 verso.
By permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College.

This figure is one of nine anatomical illustrations that are found in thirteenth century manuscripts, and which likely share a common ancestor with the five figures of ‘body systems’ found in Mansur’s Anatomy (Browne MS P.21) from Persia. Some of the figures have captions that suggest that the shared ancestor might have been written in Arabic. The vein man in this English manuscript is actually labelled wrongly ‘Historia arteriarum’ (description of the arteries). Major organs like the heart and the liver are recognisable, and the trachea is shown in blue. The veins are in red, some of them shown as if they had thin hairs on them. The brain seems to be a network of veins. Some captions are written on the interior of the body. The veins in the arms are the most important for the purpose of bloodletting, though they are not individually captioned. In the fifteenth century the leaves containing the anatomical figures were incorporated by Brother John Welles, canon of the Premonstratensians Abbey of Hagnaby in Lincolnshire into a book which he gave to his brethren.

Peter Murray Jones