Portugal Medico ou Monarchia Medico-Lusitana, historica, practica, symbolica, ethica, e politica... Parte I.

Coimbra: Joam Antunes, 1726. First edition. Hardcover. Very good. Folio. [42], 763, [1], 16pp. Text in Portuguese. Speckled calf with gold lettering, tooling and ruling on spine (lightly rubbed at extremities). Raised bands. Title page in red and black lettering. Decorative head-, tailpieces, and initials. Head and tail of spine slightly wormed. Some rubbing on covers with moderate abbrasion on calf. Some leaves lightly browned. Blank lower outer corner of final leaves wormed (not affecting text). Minor and sporadic damp-staining along fore-edge of last pages.

Only edition and all published of this wonderfully zany early 18th century attempt at a modern Portuguese Pliny! Although primarily concerned with debunking the false medical practices of his day, exposing charlatans and attacking ineffective and/or dangerous pharmaceutical compounds widely sold as medicine, this volume touches, i.e., on pygmies, eating and drinking customs, cadavers, the mechanical and liberal arts, metals, meteorology, typhoons, chiromancy and androids. Each of the twenty major sections is devoted to a single animal (man, lynx, elephant, wolf, etc..), and Abreu weaves a net of interrelation between the animal's physiology, emblematic value, the diseases it symbolizes and the cures appropriate to them. For instance, the ass opens the door to his opinions on medical ignorance. He doesn't hesitate to name colleagues he feels employ the incorrect or harmful treatments, to snipe at medical astrologers and decry the popularity of mountebanks. He himself, however, contributes a sonnet to each section, frequent notes on the ethical and moral values attached to particular disorders, a lenghty digression on magic including many incantations and a 350-line verse romance. His citations mix classical with contemporary writings, but show a particular emphasis on 17th and 18th century Portuguese physicians. Abreu's attention to the emblematic character of the physical world is quite unusual. Not in Hirsch, Waller or Krieg's "Mehr nicht Erschienen." Blake p.1; Wellcome II: 5.