Liddel's annotations

Many of the books that were owned by Duncan Liddel have manuscript notes and annotations. Nearly all of Liddel’s annotations are in Latin, even when the text is not. An interesting example of this is found in his copy of Christoph Wirsung’s Artzney Buch of 1582.

contained over 15,000 prescriptions and was one of the earliest vernacular pharmacopeoias. It quickly became one of the most popular medical books of the late sixteenth century and was reprinted several times and translated into Dutch and English.

At some point, Liddel's copy of this book was badly burned. Many of the pages were lost or partially charred beyond use. Liddel and one other person have transcribed the missing text on entire replacement sheets or attached patches of paper. Whilst Liddel’s companion transcriber copies faithfully from the German text, Liddel copies either just the heading of a prescription in the original German but quickly changes to Latin. There was no Latin version of the Artzney Buch available at that time so the Latin translation is probably Liddel’s own.