[MEDICINE]. Pharmacopoeia.

A most interesting ‘book of secrets’, compiled until c.1765, with recipes and accounts gathered from a variety of printed and ms sources, as well as personal experience. It was the working reference notebook of a French physician, who wrote down prescriptions and remedies for dozens of conditions, head-to-foot, mostly in French and occasionally Latin. These include dysentery, a clister against diarrhoea (possibly drawn from T. Sydenham’s ‘Opera’, 1714), breast tumours, remedies to make a mother’s milk cease, eye conditions, earache, toothache, nose bleed, vertigo, epilepsy, smallpox, children’s bruises, mania, asthma, gout, cataract, heatstroke (this suggests the author lived in the south, and one section is signed ‘Toulouse’), etc. The notebook also includes remedies against fungi plaguing horses’ hooves, and the best practice to exercise a horse. The author is unknown; several remedies are dated, from 1715 to 1765, some attributed to specific authorities, e.g., ‘a surgeon from Paris’, Monsieur de Cornes from Carpentras (an apothecary?), Monsieur Weissmann, Sieur Brossard, Monsieur du Moulin (1745), Madame la Marquise de Bourg, the Académie Royale des Sciences (1741-3), and le ‘Mercure de France’ (1759). One of them, it is said, obtained a pension thanks to the success of one of his remedies; and the author seems to have witnessed a declaration signed by Brossard, La Martinière, Morand, and Faubert. Some sections relate actual experiences, e.g., a remedy, taken from the Irish physician Christopher Nugent’s work, was given to the widow of Candier in Paris in 1754. One of the patients was Monsieur Touffreville, from Rouen, importer of tobacco (1760). At the end is the report of a consultation about a difficult birth drawn from ‘a journal from Verdun 1765’. He also states he received a book on hospitals in Paris from the secretary of the Académie. A most interesting ms illustrating the great variety of sources and references employed by a mid-C18 French physician of a more than usually inquiring mind.