VALLERIOLA, Francesco

by Francesco Valleriola

£1,350 · Offered by Sokol Books

First edition of the Italian physician Valleriola s entertaining collection of observations on cases, with an apparatus and prefatory letter addressed to medical students. Valleriola taught at the University of Montpellier and boasts that more than forty years of medical experience have been distilled into this work. The genre of observationes medicinales experienced a prodigious flourishing in the later C16th. There is no organising principle, each case being briefly set out and then explained, Valleriola often drawing on Galen and Hippocrates, and ending with the recipe for the cure. Valleriola s Observationum is a good example of how the case history was enlisted to support learned theory, in this case the author s own eclectic Galenism, which was typical of Montpellier-trained physicians of the period (Brian Nance, Wondrous Experience as Text: Valleriola and the Observationes Medicinales in Textual Healing: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Medicine, ed. Elizabeth Furdell (Leiden, 2005), p. 102). The book opens in dramatic fashion, Valleriola describing his wife Guardiol s near-fatal phantom pregnancy, which leads to a discussion of reproduction. Indeed, many of the cases described here are illnesses suffered by named aristocratic women, with another phantom pregnancy, this time of a young woman in Arles, resulting in the town s women being thrown into universal tumult, and its men rushing to get a look at the patient. Valleriola frequently employs language of the wonde

• Binding: Hardcover

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