Les Excentricités médicales

Paris: Jules Roussset, 1914. FIRST AND ONLY EDITION. Frontispiece portrait of Paracelsus, engraved illustration in the text. Original blue printed wrappers. An excellent copy. Only edition, an historical compendium of medical oddities in popular culture. The text addresses the Paracelsian homunculus, possession, hysteria, clairvoyance, animal magnetism, and occult healing, with case studies and bibliographic references. While the author employs no scientific method to prove or disprove the veracity of these cases, he invites the reader to consider medical advances in the framework of the fantastical. For example, skin and organs grafted onto an unrelated body tend to accept the host and grow, not unlike a homunculus. Furthermore, it is not uncommon to leave several eggs in one place and come back to find one fewer, and who is to say that the lost egg did not spontaneously become a tiny human and wander off?

Schwaeblé (1873-1922) was a French author of primarily fiction. He had no medical training, which is probably why he employed Dr. Stéphane Leduc of the Nantes medical school to write the preface.

OCLC locates two copies in the U.S. (Johns Hopkins and NLM).