VALLERIOLA, Francesco

First edition of these commentaries on Greek medical texts by Hippocrates, Galen and Aristotle. The book opens with a set of critical commentaries on Hippocrates’ Libri de Flatibus (‘On Air’) and De Natura Humana, reproducing the original Greek texts which Valleriola, an Italian physician who taught in Montpellier, translates into Latin. Some of this is based on contemporary observations, including epidemics or ‘popular’ diseases that had raged in Arles and Narbonne in 1544. There is a section derived from Aristotle on winds and whether they are sweet, humid, hot or cold, etc, with reference to the voyage of Amerigo Vespucci. The final book, on self-control (continentia) according to Galen, is addressed to the botanist Leonard Fuchs.

Valleriola adopts a pugnacious, argumentative stance, addressing disquisitions against the opinions of specific contemporary doctors, points of contention in his sources (pugnantia), and even noting disagreements between Galen and Hippocrates by dividing certain sections of Hippocrates’ works into errors (according to Galen) of  ‘impropriety,’ obscurity, inexact narration, mendacity, use of imprecise, improper and superfluous words, disorderliness, negligence, obliviousness, ineptitude, insufficiency, etc. etc. (pp. 306-307). Indeed, also printed here is a response (Responsionum Liber Unus) by Valleriola to another physician, Marinus Leporaeus, concerning an unflattering reference in the latter’s work to Valleriola as ‘Rodoricus pharmacopola,’ i.e. a drug seller or quack. Valleriola systematically takes apart Leporaeus’s commentaries on Galen, called the ‘Annotationes’, which were an attack on Valleriola’s own commentaries; the work in question is untraceable and may be fictitious, as indeed may Leporaeus (or this may be a pseudonym).