PONS, Jacopo.

Interesting and eclectic sammelband of three rare works by the little-known Lyonnaise physician Jacques Pons. First ed. first work; second ed. second, first pub. 1596; first ed. third.

The first work is aimed at medical students (‘ad tyrones’) and begins with Pons’s disquisition on what is required of medical students to make them into good doctors: learning Greek, logic, natural philosophy, astronomy, etc., the latter in particular appearing to Pons who gives a long précis on the effects of the moon, sun and planets. Pons then recommends a curriculum of reading, often with reference to specific diseases and the relevant authorities, consisting almost entirely of ancient Greek authors and effectively rejecting the Arabic tradition. However, some Arabic authors are the source for what follows, which is Pons’s collection of over three hundred ‘canons:’ gobbets of medical wisdom derived from Galen, Avicenna, Rhazes, Arnaldus de Villanova, etc., and applied, inter alia, to head pain, wakefulness, apoplexy and paralysis, angina, asthma, phthisis, heart trouble, oesophageal pain, vomiting, stomach ulcers, dysentery, liver and kidney disease, priapism, hernias, menstruation, arthritis and haemorrhoids. These are followed by recipes for curing diseases and conditions requiring sudden or rapid cures (‘subitos’), which include hangovers – the treatment for this is induced vomiting and an enema of rose oil mixed with ivy suckers – vertigo, delirium, lethargy, epileptic seizures, vomiting blood, miscarriage and difficulties in childbirth, poisoning, venomous animal bites, suffocation by smoke and drowning, the latter cured by hanging the victim by their feet.

The second work is Pons’s criticism of bloodletting in the treatment of fevers, widely used at the time, which he argued drains the body’s vital forces and leaves the patient lethargic and weakened. It is dedicated to Henry IV and preceded by numerous Latin verses from the great and good of the Lyonnaise medical establishment. Drawing largely on Galen, Hippocrates and Aristotle, this is an academic treatise on humoral medicine, suggesting other ways of dispersing and purging bad humours or humoral imbalances without resorting to excessive bloodletting. Pons argues that the ancient Greeks were not overly given to bloodletting, while naming a number of contemporary French authors who are devoted to it. He does concede, however, that in a declining fever phlebotomy can be useful. The third work contains Pons’s annotations to a botanical work by Jacques Daleschamps (1513-88), the Historia generalis plantarum, edited by the famous Lyonnaise publisher Guillaume Rouillé (d. 1589) and published by him in 1586. Pons provides a page-by-page series of notes, mostly correcting erroneous Greek usages but also providing references to ancient authors, etc. American plants are referred to on pp. 41-51, some with discussion of their medical benefits, including pineapples, camphor trees, Peruvian balsam, prickly pear, cocoa and tobacco.