In the centre of the woodcut a physician lectures a student on the art of uroscopic analysis and next to each of the urine glasses is an abbreviated key to the various diagnoses associated with these
differently coloured urine samples.
A native of Nördlingen, Pinder practised medicine there in the 1480s, before becoming physician to the Elector Frederick of Saxony and, in 1493, physician to the City of Nuremburg. This treatise, which as well as dealing with uroscopy, provides an analysis of the pulse and various types of fever, was printed on a press that Pinder had installed in his own house in 1505 – probably by his future son-in-law, Friedrich Peypus, who printed at least 11 editions of his father-in-law’s works there before moving the press, part of his wife’s dowry, to a new address in 1515.
Despite the fact that this cut would be useless in any other form, coloured copies are rare and this example of Pinder's book, in a contemporary German binding of blind tooled sheep over wooden boards, was bid to £11,000 to a collector at Christie’s on November 20.
As recently as April 2001, it had sold for $24,000 (£16,560) as part of the Helmut Friedlander library at Christie’s New York.
Colouring in the Waters, or Shades of Urine…
Fully coloured as intended, and presumably under the direction of the author/publisher, the uroscopic woodcut reproduced right is found in an internally fine copy of Ulrich Pinder’s Epiphanie medicorum… printed in Nuremburg in 1506 and is intended to show different shades of urine.
