Medicina practica, sive Methodus cognoscendorum, & curandorum omnium corporis humani affectuum

Venice: apud haeredes Melchioris Sessae, 1598. First Venice Edition. Hardcover. Good. Folio (310 x 210mm). [2],175pp., [1], 301pp. [2], 12pp., 175pp., [1]. Contemporary dark brown goatskin, (title and preliminaries lacking and supplied in early manuscript with illustrated printer’s device, some browning and staining least severe after page 9). 17th-century inscriptions on rear endpaper for Index Capitum, a medical student’s description of the various parts. Pictorial wood-engraved ex-libris by Leo Wyatt for Lord Norwich on front endpaper. Sold as is.

First Venice Edition of Capivaccio’s philosophical ‘practica’ in Galenic teachings, a pillar for medical students of the Renaissance. First edition printed in Frankfurt in 1594 under the title “Practica Medicina.” Capivaccio’s lectures were posthumously edited by Johann Hartmann Beyer. This is the first Venice edition of these lectures on the healing sciences by one of the leading Italian medical practitioners of his time is edited by Giovanni Bernardo Sessa. Capivaccio died at Padua in 1589, where he had taught at the university for 27 years. He was a specialist in venereal diseases for which he had developed certain successful cures, guarding his secrets jealously from colleagues. Capivaccio applied a philosophical approach to his practica, so much so that it is doubtful if it was ever much used as a vade mecum. By writing at such great lengths, it is clear Capivaccio wished to educate students rather than give them a handbook. Apart from the wish to restore Galenic teachings and to educate students, one motive for Capivaccio’s practica may have been to bolster the claims of university doctors over the central providers of medical expertise in the Renaissance, namely, priests, wise-women, magicians, herbalists and travelling empirics. This work important to the reform of the practice of medicine and to the wider concept of dogmatism or rationalism in medicine, the Renaissance physician could use Capivaccio’s work to locate the causes of diseases as well as its signs. NLM/Durling 816.