Eighteen Books of Medical Epistles

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Original title: Epistolarum medicinalium libri duodeviginti A Latin collection of medical letters by the Ferrarese physician Giovanni Manardo, which grew from six books (Ferrara, 1521) to the eighteen-book state printed at Basel in 1535 by Johann Bebel, and to which are joined the author's Annotationes on Mesue's simple medicines and a Censura of the compounds. The letters alternate two genres: the consilium — a dated, numbered response on diagnosis, regimen, dosage and treatment, covering plague prophylaxis and bubo surgery, cacochymia, jaundice, gout, melancholy, lethal wounds and forensic questions, guaiac wood against the morbus gallicus, and health regimens — and philological-pharmacological disputation, in which a lemma, a translation, or a drug identification becomes the occasion for textual criticism. Manardo collates Greek codices of Dioscorides, Galen and Hippocrates, corrects the Latin version of Marcello Virgilio Adriani using a printed apparatus of flagged phrase and the prefixed siglum MAN., disputes weights and measures, drug identifications and dosages, ranks Galen above other authorities while denying any of them oracular status, criticizes Avicenna's compilatory method and the apothecaries' adulterated wares, rejects judicial astrology while conceding a general celestial influx, and appeals throughout to ratio and experientia as the final arbiters. The work is in Latin with Greek lemmata and Arabic-derived pharmacological nomenclature; letters carry place-and-date subscriptions, largely from Ferrara in the 1520s and early 1530s. 👉 Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here 📜 View the original source file This text was transcribed and translated as part of the ExLatinis project—an effort by Leo to make English translations of every published text in Latin in early modern Europe (between 1450 and 1750) available to the public for free online.

• Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here
• View the original source file

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