The fields of public health, epidemiology, and preventative medicine are at the forefront of the health sciences today. An example of an early proponent of these sensibilities, long before they were in the mainstream of medical thought, is Giovanni Lancisi, an Italian physician of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Not only was Lancisi interested in the health of large populations, he was the physician to three popes, had a popular medical practice, published widely, and arranged the printing of the famous anatomical tables by Eustachius. Lancisi was a "renaissance man" in the purest sense of the phrase, enjoying the friendship of many and pursuing a rigorous scientific career while remaining in the service of the Vatican.

The Opera Varia is an edition of Lancisi's collected works that was published nineteen years after his death. It includes his work on sudden death, written after an epidemic of unexplained deaths swept through Rome in 1705. Lancisi made many contributions to cardiology, including his classic work De Motu Cordis et Aneurysmatibus, which detailed his beliefs regarding cardiovascular disease. His public health work resulted in descriptions of influenza, cattle plague, and malaria, and he recommended that the swamps surrounding Rome be drained to prevent the spread of disease. Lancisi was also greatly interested in medical history, and donated his large library to the San Spirito Hospital in Rome, where his collections of books can still be viewed and studied today.

The Ebling Library Copy (R 128.7 L369)

Our copy of Lancisi's Opera Varia is in a binding that may be contemporary with or close to the book's publication date. The first blank fly-leaf has an ownership inscription dated 1767 and the name "C. Ribe," which may refer to a man named, in various languages, Carolus Ribe or Carl Ribben, who completed a medical dissertation for Uppsala University in 1765. Although more information is needed to definitively match C. Ribe to this book, the circumstantial evidence makes it at least plausible that we have inherited a book that once belonged to a young eigteenth-century physician at the beginning of his career.