FREITAG, Johann

Rare first and only edition of this guide to purgatives derived from chemical medicine and alchemy. The author Freitag (1581-1641) was professor of medicine at Osnabrück, where he was also physician to the bishop, to whom this work is dedicated. He combines chemical medicine with humoral theories based on Greek Hippocratic and Galenic medicine, producing what is both a serious theoretical work on humoral purgation and a practical guide with recipes and instructions. Freitag uses Paracelsian recipes for several purgatives, which is interesting given the vocal opposition to Paracelsianism for which he became known, especially in his battles with his ‘nemesis’ Daniel Sennert (1572-1637).

Freitag first advises on preparation of the humours for purgation, which ones must be thickened, made dry, cold, etc., and how to do so, using baths, diet and medicines. If not purged, he warns, humours can putrefy, which leads to fevers and abscesses. Freitag advocates bleeding in extreme cases but prefers pharmaceutical purgatives. He describes, for example, the use of such purgatives in cases of dysentery. The second part of the book is a catalogue of botanical ingredients, stones and chemicals, describing their effects on the humours and what they can purge, and providing recipes for their use in syrups, electuaries, etc. The third book then revisits these ingredients and describes how to make them into pills, drawing chiefly on the Arabic physician Mesue.

The final book is a study of mercury, both as a naturally occurring chemical substance and as a poisonous metal, with recipes for the preparation of non-harmful mercurial cures. It is here that Paracelsus gets rough treatment from Freitag, on account of his ‘mythologia’ concerning ‘vital mercury,’ which he saw as a kind of bodily eternal substance. Freitag describes what must be to any Christian man the ‘monstrous, fantastical, diabolical and worthless’ opinions of Paracelsus, which the latter has introduced ‘to the stage’ like a conjuror. Freitag attacks the idea that poisonous mercury can be used in medicines, noting that the bodily substance and the metal are entirely opposed. In a final all-out attack, he calls Paracelsus a blasphemer and conflates his doctrine of earthly, eternal substances with the beliefs of the hermetical sect of the Rosicrucians, who had emerged in Germany in the first decades of the C17th. 

This copy almost certainly comes from the library of Jean-Baptiste Jérôme Bruny, Baron de la Tour d’Aigues (1725-95), a French enthusiast of the natural sciences who established an exotic menagerie and arboretum at his château near Aix-en-Provence, as well as an amateur porcelain factory, and in addition possessed a rich library of scientific works that was dispersed after the French Revolution; possibly the number entered in the book refers to an undocumented sale of his library. It seems quite likely, therefore, that one of the earlier owners who has autographed this book was the French botanist Pierre Joseph Garidel (1658-1737) who resided his whole life in Aix and was professor of botany at the university.