Gart der Gesundheit
work by Johann Wonnecke von Kaub

The Gart der Gesundheit (Early German for Latin hortus sanitatis) was edited in 1485. It was written by Johann Wonnecke von Kaub and is one of the first printed herbals in German. It was often reprinted until the 18th century. The Gart der Gesundheit is an important late medieval work concerning the knowledge of natural history, especially that of medicinal plants. In 435 chapters 382 plants, 25 drugs from the animal kingdom and 28 minerals are described and illustrated. The book was edited by Peter Schöffer in Mainz. Together with the Latin Herbarius moguntinus (Peter Schöffer 1484) and the Latin Hortus sanitatis (Jacob Meydenbach in Mainz 1491), the Gart der Gesundheit belongs to the "group of Mainz herbal incunabula".
Text
The text is a collection of earlier texts in German and in Latin on drugs from the herbal, animal, and mineral kingdoms. The reader cannot rely on the names the author gives to his citations. Sometimes he gives no name, for example for the citations he took from the Physica of Hildegard of Bingen.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 6, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q136339313. VIAF identifies the subject as 175594185. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1485, 1484 and 1491.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gart der Gesundheit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.