GABUCCINI, Hieronymus. [with] ALTOMARI, Donato Antonio.

£2,350 · Offered by Sokol Books

First editions of these impressive medical works by Girolamo Gabuccini and Donato Antonio Altomari (1520-1556). Girolamo Gabuccini was an Italian physician who wrote on topics ranging from epilepsy to gout. This work focuses on parasitic worms and is the first separate treatise on the subject. The work was successful enough that a second, possibly pirated, edition appeared at Venice in 1547 and a third at Lyon in 1549. Although the parasites he discusses, like tapeworms, had been known since antiquity, Gabuccini was innovative in his approaches to understanding their formation and their treatment. Gabuccini believed that the lesser heat in the intestine leads to tapeworm formation (Egerton, Frank. A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 12: Invertebrate Zoology and Parasitology during the 1500s , 2004). Gabuccini also discusses the liver fluke (fasciola hepatica) of sheep and goats, first written about by the French sheep farmer Jean de Brie in 1379. He attempts to understand how it infects the animal as well as the possible life cycle of the parasite. The English naturalist and physician Thomas Moffet (1553-1604) produced a commentary and analysis of Gabuccini s work on parasites in his Of the Signs and Cure of Worms out of Gabucinus . The second work is by the Italian doctor Altomari, who was an ardent follower of Middle Eastern medical practices and methodology. It focuses on gastroenterological processes including digestion, absorption and purgatione , or cleansing. Al

• Binding: Hardcover

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