Wonderful to see Sloane MS 345, an intriguing Dutch and Latin manuscript, made fully available online now. Readers may be interested to know that a lot of excellent scholarship has occurred in the history of medieval medicine in recent years. Just a couple of points for now: (1) There is a superb website available on Arnau de Vilanova, one of the most important physicians of his day: http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/arnau/en. This site reflects the work of an international team of scholars who have been editing Arnau's work for the past several decades. They have also been sifting through all the specious attributions that have accreted around Arnau's name. He is most definitely not the author of the *Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum*, and probably not of that text on the medicinal properties of oak, either. Indeed, much of his alleged association with alchemy is also specious: http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/arnau/en/corpus-alquimic. (2) For readers interested in women's medicine, they might like to know that the title given as "Liber de matrice mulieris et impugnatione" should actually be "Liber de matrice mulieris et IMPREGNATIONE," as is clearly visible in the manuscript. The title translates as "Book of the female uterus and pregnancy." Lots more to say about the other manuscripts shown, too, as we know so much more about the history of surgery and many other topics. There are hundreds of specialists in the world today working on medicine in medieval manuscripts. Maybe your readers might like a guest blog or two to introduce them to the real splendors your collection holds in the History of Medicine.

Very interesting (and apropos) blog. Your readers may have been interested to see a close-up of the scene from MS Royal F II 17. In contrast to all other medieval c-section images where the mother has already expired, Caesar's mother here is still alive! Look closely and you'll see that she's gripping the hand of her attendant. Other representations of Caesar's birth in the BL collection are: 1) London, British Library, MS Royal 16.G.VII, s. xiv ex. (Paris), f. 219r: Les faits des Romains – showing female attendants. 2) London, British Library, MS Egerton 1065, c. 1480 (Bruges), f. 9r: a copy of Jean du Chesne, Commentaires de César showing a male surgeon and female attendants. You have an amazing range of medical MSS in your collection (more in the Sloane collection even than Harley) and it would be wonderful to see them exploited more in this blog.