BRUEL, Walter.

A good copy of the first edition in English of this popular medical compendium by the Belgian physician Walter Bruel (fl. 1580s), frequently quoted by Burton in his ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’. This copy was formerly in the library of one of the most important medical institutions worldwide – the Royal College of Physicians in London, established in 1518. The work is concerned with dozens of illnesses, head to foot, and was intended for the use of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries as well as lay practitioners. Each section is devoted to the nature, symptoms and diagnosis of a specific condition, providing suggestions for remedies and surgical procedures (especially bloodletting). For instance, melancholy is described as arising from the black choler humour, which ‘so disturbs the seat of the mind, that [the sick] speak and do things repugnant to reason, and that with fear and sadness’, causing ‘evil thoughts without a manifest cause’. Sections are also devoted to nightmares, epilepsy, madness (‘an inclination of melancholy of great fierceness and alienation’), eye inflammation, deafness, hiccup, spleen tumours, jaundice, gout, syphilis, women’s illnesses and the plague (‘sometimes caused by the influence of the stars’). Since Bruel thought, like others, that the putrefaction of air could cause the plague, he advised to use sweet perfumes to improve air quality every day. The final leaf lists the units of measurement employed in the book, and their symbols, so that ‘every one may know how to compound these medicines’, without help. An influential medical work in early modern England.