MASSA, Niccolò.
Venice, apud Franciscum Bindonem et Maphaeum Pasinum, 1540
£2,350.00
FIRST EDITION. 8vo. ll. 76. Roman letter. Several later ll. a bit browned, occasional light inkstaining, spotting or dustiness, mostly marginal, a good copy in C18 quarter sheep over marbled boards, rubbed. Autograph visible to upper blank margin of second l., ‘Petri Fenriali’(?), occasional C16 marginalia, faded and illegible.
Rare first edition of this work on fevers by the Italian physician and anatomist Niccolò Massa (1489-1569), credited as being the first to describe cerebrospinal or intraventricular fluid. Taking a Galenic position and seeing fever as a corruption of the humours by pestilential air, Massa advocates prevention by adequate ventilation of houses. The last section discusses buboes and other swellings associated with plague and their treatment.
Massa’s work on fevers was influenced by personal family tragedy: in this work he cites the fatal case of his father Apollonio (f. 12v), that of his brother Tommaso (f. 13r) – fate unknown – and his sister and nephew, both of whom survived the typhoid epidemic of 1527 (f. 61r). Typhus killed his brother Antonio in 1529 (see Richard Palmer, ‘Niccolò Massa, His Family and his Fortune’ in Medical History, 25 (1981), pp. 388-9). The book also contains references to outbreaks of plague in Venice during the 1530s and to local efforts combatting plague, including the quarantine hospital on San Lazzaro in the Venetian Lagoon, now occupied by Armenian monks.
Wellcome 4105. NLM 2988. Not in Osler or Heirs of Hippocrates. BM STC It., p. 424. This ed. not in Adams.In stock
