RIVIÈRE, Lazarus, FERNEL, Jean, CULPEPER, Nicholas et al.

Tenth edition of this hugely popular translation of Lazarus Rivière (1589-1655) by the English physicians Nicholas Culpeper, Abdiah Cole and William Rowland, with a further set of over five hundred famous cures by Rivière and a short work by the sixteenth-century physician Jean Fernel (1497-1558). The Practice is a practical manual of diseases and cures, treating of diseases of the head, eyes, ears, nose, tongue, etc., the major organs, women’s diseases, bones and joints, and fevers. This is followed by Rivière’s ‘observations of famous cures,’ which he collected as eyewitness accounts from contemporary French colleagues, each describing a specific case with dates, locations, the course of the disease and the cure. One doctor describes tricking a man with chronic insomnia into thinking he has been killed – the doctor places leeches on the patient’s head and then pretends to cut his throat, the razor being covered with blood from the leeches, before wrapping him in shrouds and placing him in a darkened room – thereby inducing him at last to sleep. The work by Jean Fernel is similarly concerned with specific cases and reports of their cures, though these take the popular medieval form of consilia or ‘counsels,’ which are the doctor’s responses to written pleas from patients or fellow doctors – sometimes included here – describing problematic cases and asking for advice, the cure being given in Fernel’s reply.