CARTWRIGHT, Thomas.; with [HESTER, John, trans.; FIORAVANTI, Leonardo.]; with LEVENS, Peter.; and [LANGHAM, William.]

A very rare survival – a sammelband of four C16 English medical works, three in the first edition. Rebound in the early C18, most probably in Scotland, the book was still being used as a reference work by a series of (likely related) C18 physicians: Thomas, John, and James Milne. Although we have not traced their names in any of the four Scottish universities’ early student registers – which include variations such as Mille, Mill, Mylne, or Millne – James signed himself at Brora, on the north coast, the nearest university being Aberdeen. Several annotations include Scottish spelling, e.g., ‘marcat’ for market. In 1712-14, Thomas appears to have had this sammelband bound or rebound, with some works in already incomplete copies, and added blanks for annotations. It is also possible that he deliberately discarded (or disposed of) those parts of works which were not relevant to study or practice. He created a table of contents for Cartwright’s work, and filled several blanks with recipes drawn from books of secrets: to drain a swollen leg, treat the gut, etc. Most interesting is the section on ‘how to become invisible’, using heliotropium and a laurel leaf enclosed in a wolf’s tooth, possibly ultimately drawn from Copeland’s ‘Booke of Secrets of Albertus Magnus’ (1561), which also includes a recipe requiring the ‘matrix of a young frog’. Others include remedies for women who cannot conceive, against St Anthony’s fire (shingles), dropsy, how to help a woman deliver a still-born baby, against the falling sickness, jaundice, falling hair, and others. He was also probably using German sources, as he mentions the German name of spondilium and borrows the convention of ticking U to differentiate it from cursive N, typical of German fraktur handwriting. Thomas’ hand alternates with that of James Milne, who copied other remedies. They both copied two Scottish poems or songs, which we have not traced: ‘I did me to the marcat / To see what I could spy…’ and ‘The bee is wowndorous small / and naughtie in esteeme’, both with variations. At rear is a prayer for a family, from A. Dent’s ‘Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven’. Thomas also wrote of himself: ‘Thomas Millne is a Whigg’, then crossed-out.

‘A hospitall of the diseased’ is attributed to Thomas Cartwright (1535-1603), one of the leading Puritan preachers and master of Warwick’s Lord Leycester hospital from 1585. The preface, signed T.C., urges sick people to ‘delay no time, but with a final price buy a gem worth gold (this book, I mean)’, which provides recipes ‘as in a cunning Apothecary’s shop’.  This pocket manual is made of dozens of short sections, each devoted to a remedy: e.g., against the plague, ague, back pain, burns caused by gunpowder, scalding, eye conditions, for clearing the voice, toothache, etc. The (here fragmentary) ‘Short discours […] uppon chirurgerie’ is comprises ‘translations of extracts from several different works of the Bolognese physician Fioravanti, the first part (leaves 1-14) being chapters 1-23 (with some omissions) of his ‘Discorsi sopra la chirugia’, […] an appendix to his edition of the ‘Compendio di tutta la cirugia’ by P. and L. Rostini. The remainder was drawn from others of Fioravanti’s works, including ‘Tesoro della vita humana, and Capricci medicinali’ (Durling). It touches on a great variety of subjects, e.g., remedies for all captains and soldiers that travel either by water or by land’ for insomnia, jaundice, palsy, dropsy, and the measures to be observed by those who enter into any bath or drink water from a bath. The translator, John Hester (d.1593) contributed to the circulation of Paracelsian medicine in England. ‘A right profitable booke’ was written by Peter Levens (1552-87), a lexicographer trained at Oxford, and a ‘student of Phisicke and Surgery’. Structured as a book of secrets, it comprises dozens of short recipes for remedies head-to-foot, e.g., against headache, nose-bleeding, chipping of the lips, bleeding gums, for blood in urine, incontinence, sweeling of the knees, etc. ‘The garden of health’ (here fragmentary), by the obscure William Langham, is an alphabetic dictionary of the most important common medical herbs and plants, with their virtues, and with recipes and quantities to be used according to the ailment. They include grass, gratiola, housleek, horstail, and horsemint – all very interestingly identified by their English name. A wonderful, quite unique sammelband.