The Voynich Manuscript as a Visual Medical-Pharmaceutical System: Contextual Dictionary V5.17, Humoral Medicine, and the School-Balneary Hypothesis

This working paper presents a contextual operational hypothesis for the Voynich Manuscript. It proposes that the manuscript may function as a visual medical-pharmaceutical system rather than as a conventional text to be deciphered word by word. EVA is used only as an instrumental transcription of the signs, not as the real alphabet or phonetic system of the manuscript. The V5.17 model reads recurring sign groups as technical abbreviations whose meaning depends on the visual and functional domain of each section. The same operator may act on a plant in the herbal section, on a body in water in the balneological section, on a prepared substance in the pharmacy or recipe sections, or on a phase or state in the zodiacal and astronomical sections. The central principle is that the image determines the domain. In the herbal section, the plant image identifies or recalls the plant and may suggest its virtue through colour, form, and visual analogy. The intended reader is assumed to know the plant and its traditional medical virtue, while the text indicates how to prepare, extract, moderate, fix, or apply that virtue. The paper distinguishes between use and virtue: use refers to the medical application, while virtue refers to the operative force of the substance, such as cooling, heating, drying, moistening, purging, opening, resolving, consolidating, or numbing. The paper also develops a cautious theory of colour and form in the herbal section. Red may suggest blood, heat, wounds, circulation, active virtue, or danger; yellow or ochre may suggest dryness, maturity, yellow bile, or dry preparation; white may suggest freshness, phlegm, softness, or refrigeration; blue or black may suggest cold, melancholy, toxicity, or dark potency; green may suggest humidity, freshness, or living matter. These colour values are treated as heuristic signals, not as fixed automatic equivalences. The model is extended to the balneological, pharmaceutical, recipe, zodiacal, stellar, and astronomical sections. In the balneological section, nymphs, water, pipes, vessels, and channels are read as parts of a bodily water-regimen involving entrance, immersion, thermal transition, opening, drainage, and stabilization. In the pharmacy and recipe sections, the subject becomes the prepared substance, vessel, or compound. In the zodiacal and astronomical sections, circular or diagrammatic structures are interpreted as phase systems rather than linear sentences. A complementary historical hypothesis is proposed: the manuscript may have been produced or used in a teaching environment, medical school, university community, or technical circle linked to pharmacy, humoral astrology, and balneary practice. It may preserve traces of several hands or stages of copying, correction, and use. In this reading, the Voynich Manuscript would be a study book or technical notebook for already trained readers, possibly associated with a community near a bath or balneary culture. This is not presented as a definitive decipherment. It is a structured and falsifiable working hypothesis intended to support further analysis of the Voynich Manuscript as a text-image system combining humoral medicine, medieval pharmacology, visual virtues, baths, recipes, pharmacy, zodiacal phases, and astronomical regulation.