PACINUS, Jacobus.

by Jacobus Pacinus

£1,650 · Offered by Sokol Books

First edition of this polemical work in the debate around thin or weak humours, said by Pacinus to cause fever before they can be treated through purgation, and which he proposes treating by fattening or thickening of the humours. The title promises to reconcile the differing Greek and Arabian authorities on the matter, while also demolishing the objections of two modern physicians, the German botanist Leonhard Fuchs (1501-66) and the Italian physician Giovanni Manardo (1462-1536), who disagreed with Pacinus s (and Galen s) identification of bile and especially yellow bile as a thin or weak humour. Pacinus, on whom almost nothing appears to have been written and about whom there is very little known, draws on numerous ancient and medieval authorities from the Greek and Arabic traditions, noting where they agree and disagree: Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotle, Paul of Aegina, Aetius of Amida, Alexander of Aphrodisias and Ammonius Lithotomos on the Greek side, and Avicenna and Averroes on the Arabic side, as well as several medieval French and Italian physicians, whom he calls the Latins. In the end Pacinus is able to draw Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Paul of Aegina and Avicenna to his side. This mainstream approach was contrary to the Fuchsian method, which was more rigorously humanistic and purist, insisting that the ancient Greek authorities should be read without the subsequent accretions of medieval and Arabic traditions. While Fuchs and the humanists would triumph in the ac

• Binding: Hardcover

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