We know, thanks to our scribe Christoforus B., that 10a 159 was completed in July 1493. But where did go from there? We don’t know who the first owners may have been, but book stamps, inscriptions, and sale catalogues can tell us about later owners.
Peter Kidd identifies the above book stamp as belonging to Donato Ferdinando Antonio Silva (1690-1779), Count Silva of Milan, and a naturalist. Kidd believes 10a 159 is the “Macri de virtutibus herbarum et aromatum…Ms in-4o saeculi XV” listed in the Catalogo de’ libri della Biblioteca Silva in Cinisell (Monza, 1811).
It seems the manuscript passed to Silva’s nephew, who sold it in Paris on February 15, 1869, at the Conte Ercole Silva sale, according to Seymour de Ricci’s Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada (New York, 1937; reprinted 1961). It was bought by Gay at that sale, and, according to de Ricci and Kidd, then passed to Dr. John Stockton Hough. Hough is listed as a physician living at 2003 Walnut Street in Philadelphia from 1871 to 1877. While there is no evidence that he practiced medicine after 1877, he did write articles on topics such as hygiene, biology, speculative physiology and statistics, and he developed a number of surgical instruments. Hough was also a bibliophile, and began amassing a collection of medical texts that supported the publication of his catalog Incunabula Medica in 1889. When he died in 1900, the estate inventory listed his library as being assessed at $900.00, the second most valuable piece of property in his estate. Much of his library came to the College after his death.
The College purchased 10a 159 from Hough’s estate with the Caspar Wistar Library Fund for $2.00 and it was accessioned into the collection on September 21, 1901.
*Again, please refer to Peter Kidd’s A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in the Library of the College of Physicians, Philadelphia for more details about the provenance of this manuscript. Peter Kidd received an F.C. Wood Institute travel grant in September 2015 to do a bibliographic description of the Library’s pre-1500 manuscripts.