GASPARIS, Stefano de [with] PERLA, Francesco.

£1,750 · Offered by Sokol Books

Rare first editions of these two pharmaceutical essays discussing the provenance, use and characteristics of the true opobalsamum, a rare and precious ingredient of theriac. Theriac was an ancient medical concoction: originally formulated by the Greeks as a cure for snakes bites, it later became an antidote for all poisons. In the Renaissance, it was widely produced and prescribed as a universal panacea against all diseases. Among its numerous ingredients, opobalsamum a balm obtained from a tree native of Arabia, Africa and India was so expensive and difficult to find, that it was often falsified and many in Europe believed that it no longer existed. In the 1640s, a famous polemic arose between Italian apothecaries and physicians, when the Roman doctor Stefano de Gasparis published Liquoris artificialis pro opobalsamo (here), accusing Antonio Manfredi and Vincenzo Pannuzzi, two apothecaries, of producing their theriac using false opobalsamum. In this work, de Gasparis claims that the substance that they used, which was bought on the Venetian market, was not genuine. The treatise comprises four books, the first dedicated to presenting the characteristics of real opobalsamum according to ancient sources, the second and third aimed at demonstrating that what Manfredi and Panuzzi employed was not authentic opobalsamum obtained from the plant, but a fabricated mixture of ingredients, and the last concluding that their theriac was therefore ineffective and useless . In the followin

• Binding: Hardcover

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