EDWARDES, David.

Exceptionally rare first edition of this work on diagnosis by uroscopy and prognostication by the English physician David Edwardes or Eguard (d.1542). The British Library and St. John's, Oxford copies also contains the separate 10 leaf "introduction to anatomy" mentioned in the title page; the UCAL copy, like ours, does not. Each work has its own collation and colophon. 

Edwardes describes medical symptoms he had observed, including in a farmer, merchant, student, and female patient, as well as the corresponding prognoses. 'In his practice of medicine Edwardes appears to have represented, as we might expect, a combination of the old and the new. While giving support to uroscopy and displaying some sympathy toward folk medicine, he also gave allegiance to Hippocrates and Galen, and like his Continental colleagues of this period he was not averse to the introduction of a word or even several lines of Greek into his text, so indicating his enthusiasm for and his ties with the classical revival' (C.D. O'Malley and K.F. Russell, Introduction to Anatomy 1532 (Oxford: 1961), p. 9). Edwardes also praises Thomas Linacre as being one of the most learned men of the age (C3r). 

Edwardes dedicated the book to Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, illegitimate son of Henry VIII, signing the dedicatory letter 'medicus suus', implying he was Fitzroy's personal doctor. Educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a bastion of humanist Greek teaching, and then Cambridge, Edwardes travelled to Venice in 1525, where he contributed to Aldus's Greek edition of Galen's Opera, alongside Thomas Lupset, John Clement and William Rose. He may also have gone to Padua, where the revival of classical Greek medical texts had reintroduced the study of anatomy, especially through the dissection of cadavers, as a cornerstone of medical teaching and research; in this he would have followed notable English physicians of the previous generation such as Linacre and Thomas Grocyn. Returning to Cambridge, Edwardes received his MD in 1529, and at some point practised in Bristol, which he mentions in this book: 'I having left my teachers only shortly before and begun to swim without any support' (E1r). He is credited with having undertaken the first dissection of a cadaver in England, said to have taken place in Cambridge in 1531 (ODNB). It would be many years, however, before such anatomical study was introduced regularly (and legally) into medical training in England, despite the efforts of physicians such as John Caius.