ALPINO, Prospero

by Prospero Alpino

£3,950 · Offered by Sokol Books

A well-margined copy of this remarkably influential medical treatise one of the earliest European studies of non-Western medicine (Norman 39) interpreted not as a different tradition but as a parallel system of practices that could be compared to Western ones, sometimes through the work of Venetian colleagues. Prospero Alpini (1553-1617) was a Venetian physician and botanist whose fame led to his appointment as prefect in charge of the botanical garden in Padua, one of the oldest in the world, and professor at the same university. His numerous works concerned with medicine and botany were greatly influenced by his travels in Egypt in the early 1580s, as personal physician to Giorgio Emo, Venetian Consul at Cairo. De medicina Aegyptiorum is entirely devoted to the medical customs of Egyptians, and structured in the form of a dialogue between Alpinus and the botanist Melchior Guilandino. The first section discusses the state of art of Egyptian medicine, the most frequent illnesses and epidemics. A substantial part was devoted to the plague, its recent manifestation in Cairo (with half a million victims) and its transmission (through contagion from Greece, not as believed in natural cycles of seven years). For European readers with much more than an academic interest in questions of the origin and means of transmission of the plague, Alpini s views remained points of reference and contention well into the nineteenth century (Seth, Difference and Disease , 35). The second, third

• Binding: Hardcover

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