Pharmacopoeia Londinensis: or, The New London Dispensatory. In VI Books. Translated into English for the Public Good, and Fitted to the Whole Art of Healing

Description

~Original panelled Cambridge binding, corners of outer panel decorated in blind with small tools. Raised bands and half handwritten label to spine. Minor loss to top spine (c. 0.5cm). Boards just starting at top spine over front and rear hinges. 8vo (12.3 x 18cm). Hinges very slightly tender. Endpapers cracked at gutters. Minor worm damage to inside front board at base, extending through text block to p. 105, mostly as pinprick to bottom margin and with no impact on text. Minor pen annots to front endpapers; old cancelled owners’ signatures to title page. Moderate age-browning and foxing. Index to rear; advertisements to verso of final leaf. The 7th edn of the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis as translated and edited by William Salmon (1644-1713). Salmon, ‘medical empiric’ (ODNB) and prolific author, first and foremost of works of popular medicine. Reportedly apprenticed as a child to a mountebank who travelled as far afield as New England, Salmon was an unlicensed medical practitioner in the tradition of Nicholas Culpeper, writing numerous popular medical manuals that ‘offered a variety of remedies compounded from ingredients which were few in number, cheap, common, easily mixed, efficacious, safe, durable, and small in dose’ (ODNB). His much-republished translation of the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis expanded on this work. The Pharmacopoeia itself, first published in Latin in 1618, had been an attempt by the Royal College of Physicians to exert control over the work of apothecaries, who offered cheaper and more accessible medical services to the general populace and who had established an independent Worshipful Society of Apothecaries in 1617. The Pharmacopoeia was the first officially sanctioned list of all known medical preparations, and a royal proclamation of James VI / I commanded that all apothecaries should prepare and dispense remedies only according to its directions. As such, it was ‘a mighty weapon dressed up as a book’ (Vaughan, 2017, Grave and learned men: the physicians, 1518-1660), enforcing an effective monopoly of physicians over medical diagnosis and treatment. This power was first compromised by Culpeper’s 1649 vernacular translation, which by expanding the Pharmacopoeia’s instructions on compounding and administering medications transformed the work into a medical sourcebook for the general reader, breaking ‘the monopoly held by the apothecaries as well as that of the physicians’ (ODNB). Salmon, working a generation later and from updated versions or the Parmacopoeia, continued this trajectory, offering its reader a comprehensive account of materia medica from the now-startling (‘quintessence of Wolfs Flesh’) to the familiar (‘camomil’), together with instructions on diagnosis and treatment. ESTC T132583. Robust packaging. Overseas orders trackable on request.