[MEDIOLANO, Joannes de.]

Rare French edition of this famous Latin poem originating in the Italian medical School of Salerno, translated by Michel Le Long, a Provinois physician, with a discourse and additional explicatory passages by him. Also here are two translations from Greek by Le Long into French verse: the Letters of the ancient Greek physician Diocles of Carystus (c. 4^th century B.C.) and the Hippocratic Oath. Editions with Long’s translations appeared in 1633 and 1643, both printed in Paris.

Ostensibly a poem about medical ailments and their cures, the vast majority of the ‘regimen’ concerns nutrition and diet, the commentary chiefly referring to advice from Galen, Hippocrates, and the medieval Arabic tradition, Avicenna, Rhazes and Averroes. This becomes an entirely gastronomical book, though herbal cures are also described. At the end the humours and their imbalances are discussed. This edition usefully breaks up the text to clearly denote which foodstuff is being dealt with: fish, meat, dairy, fruits, herbs, spices, and beer and wine. There are numerous sections on wine: on how “young” wines can be harmful; on the different effects of drinking “claret” (red) and sweet white wines; how to tell good wine; and a remedy for those who have drunk too much.

The Regimen ‘was committed to memory by thousands of physicians and, after the invention of printing, was published in nearly three hundred editions, in Latin as well as in several vernacular languages … this collective effort remains one of the most revealing medical works of the Middle Ages’ (Heirs of Hippocrates, p. 20). Diocles’ ten Letters, dedicated with a preface to ‘King Antigone,’ discuss several body parts (head, thorax, belly and bladder) as well as various astrological equinoxes.