BRASAVOLA, Antonio Musa.

The first edition of this important work on herbal medicaments. A note in Italian, on the partly charred front endpaper, states that this copy was saved by the Inquisitorial fire by the cleric Paolo Celso, in Perugia, on 14 September 1600 – a year of intense inquisitorial activity in Perugia, and only six months after Giordano Bruno’s burning at the stake in Rome. Oddly enough, Celso also noted down a long recipe for a medicament to strengthen the kidneys ‘so as to always have successful and pleasant intercourse with a beautiful woman, whether a duchess, princess, or queen’, ‘even for more elderly men, so that their lady might respect and love them more’. One wonders whether this particular note might have been the reason for the book having been damned to the flames. This copy was in France later in the C17, apparently in the library of the writer François (1613-80), 2^nd Duke de La Rochefoucauld – although we have not traced a similar paper slip with his name anywhere else – and was gifted to the Sieur de Fregeville in 1662.  

Antonio Musa Brasavola (1500-55) was a physician and professor at Ferrara. ‘He was a pupil of Niccolò Leoniceno (Leonicenus), a famous Italian medical humanist […]. Brasavola served as personal physician to the Popes Paul III, Leo X, Clement VII, and Julius III; to Emperor Charles V, King Francis I, and King Henry VIII. He wrote some seventy books and articles, is said to have performed a large number of tracheotomies and described over two hundred different kinds of syphilis’ (Heirs of Hippocrates). Each section provides recipes and observations on how to prepare and administer specific medicaments, and what conditions they are most useful against. Among the dozens of herbs (but also a few minerals and other substances) are absinth, cardamom, cumin, lapis lazuli, various oils, human urine, and ‘confectio brassaulica’, created by the author himself. In particular, Brasavola was interested in herbs causing purgation of excess in the four humours as well as blood more generally. An important work in a most interesting copy.