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Abstract

In the following contribution the relevant aspects of the broadsheet of the municipial physician from Nuremberg Theodoricus Ulsenius of 1496 are represented. The broadsheet attracted the attention of the history of art because of the wood-cut, attributed to Durer, and became famous as the so-called Picture of the Plague-Stricken Man. The history of medicine on the other hand identifies the unknown new disease, described by Ulsenius in the latin text, as an early description of syphillis. To men at the turn of the 16th century, this disease appeared as an expression of divine wrath. The Renaissance medical science, influenced by the philosophy of Neo-Platonism, explained its orgin as the consequence of a cosmological constellation. Apart from this the broadsheet as an incunabulum has some relevance for the history of early letter-press printing, of which Nuremberg with its circles of artists and scholars represented an important centre.