MIZAULD, Antoine [with] DIOCLES CARYSTUS [and] MIZAULD

£2,950 · Offered by Sokol Books

Exceptional sammelband of medical and botanical works by the prolific French astronomer and physician Antoine Mizauld (1510-78), with charming evidence of French provincial provenance. The second, fifth and sixth works are first editions. The first work, the Nine Centuries, is an entertaining and eccentric collection of nine hundred medical and natural-historical marvels, many taken from classical sources, with a useful index listing every entry. Women s medicine features strongly, including several sensational and harrowing stories of abnormal births. Other old wives tales include a test for virginity, which makes a corrupted woman urinate uncontrollably, and advice on how to make a wife confess her infidelities to her husband while asleep, by placing the tongue of a frog, duck or owl on her heart. There is plentiful material on the powers of precious gems and stones, as well as healing waters, and herbal and botanical draughts. Half of the second work is dedicated to wines made from a wide variety of plants, and describes their use as purgatives, with material derived from Cato the Elder, Dioscorides and the medieval author Arnoldus de Villa Nova. This treatise, otherwise dedicated to botanical cures as well as the medical effects of meat, is followed by the Alexikepus, another discursive work on gardening and the medical uses of botanical products. A third botanical work, the Hortorum Secreta, contains advice on growing plants, including giant gourds over nine feet long, a

• Binding: Hardcover

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