ABSTRACT
In the beginning of the sixteenth century in Freiburg, somewhere between 1503 and 1519, the Carthusian monk and scholar Gregor Reich published a remarkable work: the Margarita Philosophica, which translates to ‘the pearl of philosophy.’ In this treatise, he outlines the current state of scientific affairs in his era. This voluminous work can be seen as the first encyclopaedia in print, and functions as a scientific conclusion of the Middle Ages forming the base that the Renaissance could be built upon. The book contains a plethora of high-quality, hand-coloured woodcuts to illustrate theories. These include an illustration of the human body showing the positions of the organs in the abdominal cavity (Fig. 8.1). As was the case with the few extant medieval anatomical illustrations of this portion of the body, we see a schematic depiction of the liver that shows the organ having multiple lobes. In the upper abdomen and below the diaphragm, we see, from left to right, the liver, the stomach, and the spleen.
