Voynich manuscript- A 1500 -Year-Old Mystery Solved-2

Further study of the herbs and images in thebook reminded Gibbs of other Latin medical texts. When he consulted the Trotula and De Balneis Puteolanis, two commonly copied medieval Latin medical books, he realized that a lot of the Voynich Manuscript's texts and images had been plagiarized directly from them(they in turn were copied in parts from ancient Latin texts by Galen, Pliny and Hippocrates). During the Middle Ages, it was very common for scribes to reconstruct and reproduce older texts to preserve the knowledge in them. There were no formal rules about copyright and authorship, and indeed books extremely rare, so nobody complained. Once he realized that the Voynich Manuscript was a medical textbook, Gibbs explained, it helped him understand the odd images in it. Pictures of plants referred to herbal medicines, and all the images of bathing women marked it out as a gynecological manual. Baths were often prescribed as medicine, and the Romans were particularly fond of the idea that a nice dip could cure all ills. Zodiac maps were included because ancient and medieval doctors believed that certain cures worked better under specific astrological signs. Gibbs even identified one image—copied, of course, from another manuscript—of women holding donut-shaped magnets in baths. Even back then, people believed in the pseudoscience of magnets. (The women's pseudoscience health website Goop would fit right in during the 15th century.) The Voynich Manuscript has been reliably dated to mere decades before the invention of the printing press, so it's likely that its peculiar blend of plagiarism and curation was a dying format. Once people could just reproduce several copies of the original Trotula or De Balneis Puteolanis on a printing press, there would have been no need for scribes to painstakingly collate its information into a new, handwritten volume. Gibbs concluded that it's likely the Voynich Manuscript was a customized book, possibly created for one person, devoted mostly to women's medicine. Other medieval Latin scholars will certainly want to weigh in, but the sheer mundanity of Gibbs' discovery makes it sound plausible.