Science
Contact Andrea Mazzocchi
Science at Quaritch is broadly defined, ranging from medicine, anatomy, pharmacology (including herbals) and natural history to astronomy, physics, chemistry and mathematics.
An interest in the origins of modern chemistry has led to a specialisation in works on alchemy and distillation, and from there we have also branched out into occultism and hermeticism. We have developed an interest in gastronomy and books on nutrition and wine, an area which over the years has become one of our specialities.-
ORIBASIUS.
Commentaria in Aphorismos Hippocratis … Ioannis Guinterij Andernaciis medici industria velut e profundissimis tenebris...
Paris, Simon de Colines, 1533.
First edition of this commentary on Hippocrates, bound with a richly annotated copy of Galen’s works in the translation by Thomas Linacre.
£1750
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BLANCHON, Jacques.
Iacobi Blanchoni ucessiensis adversus Ludovicum beneventanum abbatem selestensem defensionum liber.
Lyon, Jean de Tournes, 1550.
First edition of a very rare work of sixteenth-century Lyonnese Neoplatonism, an elegantly-printed de Tournes edition. Ostensibly a simple series of remarks against the theses of the (presumably sternly Scholastic) abbot of Selestan, this is a tract of Renaissance moral philosophy. The theme of...
£950
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[GALEN.] STEPHANUS.
Stephani Atheniensis philosophi explanationes in Galeni priorem librum therapeuticum ad Glauconem, Augustino...
Venice, Giunta, November 1554.
First edition of Agostino Gadaldini’s Latin translation of Galen’s medical treatise Ad Glauconem and of Stephanus’ commentary upon it, enhanced with his own scholia.
£950
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LANDI, Bassiano.
De origine et causa pestis Patauinae, anni MDLV ...
Venice, apud Balthassarem Constantinum (colophon: ‘Ioan. Gryphius excudebat’), 1555.
First edition of this important work investigating the causes of the plague which struck Padua in 1555, by the eminent, and controversial, professor of medicine Bassiano Landi (d. 1562). In his De origine Landi argues against the then popular belief that the plague had been caused by putrid...
£1250
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GIOVANNI BATTISTA DA NAPOLI.
Opera et trattato, che insegna molti dignissimi secreti contra la peste, con li quali subito si...
[Venice, 1556?]
Rare second revised edition (first 1527) of this work offering advice against the plague by the Augustinian friar Giovanni Battista, interleaved and annotated with unpublished Latin notes on the subject.
£2750
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ALEXIS OF PIEDMONT (i.e. Girolamo RUSCELLI?).
The Secretes of the reverende Maister Alexis of Piemount: contayning excellent...
London, Henry Bynneman, for John Wight, 1568.
The Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont in English, complete in all four parts – fourth edition of part I, third editions of parts II and III, and first edition of part IV.
£4500
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MERCURIALE, Girolamo.
De arte gymnastica libri sex, in quibus exercitationum omnium vetustarum genera, loca, modi, facultates,...
Venice, [Lucantonio II] Giunta, 1587.
Third edition of ‘the first illustrated book on gymnastics’ (Morton). A physician occupying senior posts in the medical faculties of Padua, Bologna, Rome, and Pisa, Girolamo Mercuriale (1530–1606) draws heavily on accounts of ancient exercise to argue for its medical benefits, being the...
£2750
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MANFREDI, Girolamo; Pedro de RIBAS, translator.
Libro llamado El porque provechosissimo para la conservacion de la salud,...
Alcalá de Henares, Juan Iñiguez de Lequerica, 1587 [colophon: Hernan Ramirez, 1589].
Extremely rare early edition of Pedro de Ribas’s Spanish translation of Girolamo Manfredi’s popular Liber de Homine, first published in 1567.
£1250
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AELIANUS, Claudius, Conrad GESSNER (translator), and Pierre GILLES (editor).
Περι ζωων ιδιοτητος...
Cologny, Philippe Albert, 1616.
Uncommon Geneva edition of Aelianus’s De animalium natura, the Greek printed in parallel with Gessner’s Latin translation. A third-century work on natural history, Aelianus’s text offers accounts and anecdotes of animals, ‘an appealing collection of facts and fables about the animal...
£300
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MARKHAM, Gervase.
Cavalarice, or the English Horseman: Contayning all the Art of Horse-manship, asmuch as is necessary for any...
London, Edward Allde for Edward White, [1616–] 1617.
A beautiful copy of the second edition, ‘corrected and augmented’, of Markham’s Cavalarice, exceptionally well-preserved in a contemporary binding, from the library of the antiquary Sir John Marsham.
£12000
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BENZI, Ugo.
Regole della sanità et della natura de cibi … arricchita d’un trattato nuovo della ebbrietà et dell’ abuso...
Turin, heirs of Giovanni Domenico Tarino, 1618.
Scarce first edition of the vernacular works of the medieval Spanish physician Ugo Benzi (1376-1439) with commentary by the Turinese doctor Giovanni Lodovico Bertaldi (d. 1625), an extraordinary witness to their enduring popularity into the seventeenth century. Benzi’s Italian writings were first...£2500
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RONDINELLI, Francesco.
Relazione del contagio stato in Firenze l’anno 1630 e 1633 con un breve ragguaglio della miracolosa immagine...
Florence, Gio. Batista Landini, 1634.
First edition of this official account of the Florentine plague of 1630 and 1633, commissioned by Ferdinando II de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, and composed by his librarian Rondinelli from official records and interviews with survivors. Plague had been brought to Italy in 1629 by troops fighting...
£950
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TALIANI, Giuseppe.
Orologi riflessi, per mezo di un picciolo specchio parallelo o perpendicolare all’orizonte.
Macerata, Filippo Camacci, 1648.
Only recorded edition, rare, of this work by mathematician Taliani on the construction of sundials in the interior of buildings, to be achieved through mirrors reflecting solar rays – our copy uniquely furnished with a contemporary large hand-drawn representation of the face of a sundial. ...
£950
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CASAUBON, Meric.
A Treatise concerning Enthusiasme, as it is an effect of nature but is mistaken by many for either divine inspiration,...
London, R.D. for Thomas Johnson, 1655 [i.e. 1654].
First edition of the first separate treatise on ‘enthusiasm’, a pioneering work of psychiatry avant la lettre and one of the most ground-breaking publications in a very public controversy. Of all Casaubon’s books, this has been shown as the most directly linked to the publication of John...
£1750
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SALADO GARCES Y RIBERA, Francisco.
Varias materias de diversas facultades, y sciencias politica contra peste, govierno en lo espiritual,...
Utrera, Juan Malpartida, 1655.
Very rare first edition of this highly interesting work on plague, viewed from medical, religious, and political standpoints, by a lawyer from Utrera in southern Spain, written in the wake of the devastating epidemic that struck the city and province of Seville in 1649 as part of the Great Plague...
£2500
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STATUTA COLLEGII DD.
Almae Urbis Medicorum ex antiquis Romanorum Pontificum bullis congesta, & hactenùs per Sedem Apostolicam...
Rome, Printer of the Apostolic Chamber, 1676 [– c.1745].
The very rare enlarged and updated issue of the statutes of the medical faculty of Rome, a very rare and interesting document on its internal organization.
£550
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DESCARTES, René, and Louis de la FORGE (editor).
Tractatus de homine, et de formatione foetus.
Amsterdam, Daniel Elzevir, 1677.
First and only Elzevir edition, and the first edition of the better Latin text of Descartes’s Traité de l’homme. De homine ‘is the first work in the history of science and medicine to construct a unified system of human physiology that presents man as a purely material and...
£1100
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MARINIS, Dominico de.
Dissertatio philosophico-medica de re monstrosa à Capuccino Pisauri per urinam excreta. Plura de sanguinis...
Rome, typis Iacobi Mascardi ... sumptibus Ben Carrarae, 1678.
First edition of this scarce dissertation on worms focussing on the extraordinary case of a Capuchin preacher from Pesaro who in 1677 passed a ‘monster’ worm in his urine, which upon subsequent examination was declared to be a serpent.
£1850
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CIUCCI, Antonio Filippo.
Promptuarium Chirurgicum in quo agitur de Morbis, qui indigent manuali Operatione Artis Chirurgiae.
Macerata, Joseph Piccinus, 1679–1680.
First edition, very rare, of this handbook of practical surgery, by the author of the first treatise of forensic medicine written in Italian.
£2850
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[DE LA GUTHÈRE.]
Du bon usage des eaux de Baignieres.
Agen, Antoine Bru … 1680.
Second edition, revised, a guide to the waters at Bagnères-de-Bigorre in South-West France by a local physician, dedicated to the young Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, duc de Maine (1670–1736), son of Louis XIV and his mistress Madame de Montespan.
£600