Caspar Stromayr - Practica Copiosa

Caspar Stromayr - Practica Copiosa

Caspar Stromayr (d. 1566/67) was a practicing surgeon and ophthalmologist in Lindau on Lake Constance who was the first to differentiate between internal and external hernias. He is believed to have been born to a family of surgeons of Augsburg and practiced his trade in Zurich and Nuremberg before moving to Lindau. There he married Guta, the daughter of Ulrich von Angelburg, another surgeon, in whose practice he probably also worked as a journeyman. This marriage also enabled Stromayr to join the appropriate guild and eventually get partial citizenship in 1561, allowing him to establish his own practice but also requiring him to provide free care for the poor as well as paying high taxes to contribute to the city’s defense.

An Unfinished Magnum Opus

His surgical textbook from 1559 focusing on hernias, considered to be an advanced work at the time, features an appendix concerning ophthalmology, one of the earliest works on the subject in German, that describes possible causes of cataracts as well as practical options for treating them. The manuscript presenting his work was created by a scribe and a team of four artists as he was writing it, suggesting he was intimately involved in the creation of the splendid work. Aside from depicting surgical instruments, the mostly full-page miniatures include detailed depictions of contemporary clothing and everyday objects. They thus offer a splendid glimpse of life in the mid-16th century. However, work on the manuscript cuts off abruptly in the middle of some prepared chapters in 1566, so it is assumed that Stromayr died sometime around then or the next year.
The unbound fascicles passed to his father-in-law and were temporarily lent to the Lindau barber Ludwig Oberreit, who left some of his own annotations on the sheets. In 1577, von Angelburg sold the manuscript to the city of Lindau, which had them bound the same year. However, the texts were not organized in the correct order and the ophthalmological text was originally designed as a separate work: the work on hernias was intended as a gift for the Zurich doctor Peter Hafner, while the ophthalmological work was supposed to remain in Lindau.