[Collection of medical recipes]. An Italian manuscript pharmacopoeia.

€ 3,000.00

A comprehensive collection of medical recipes in Latin and Italian, much used, updated and corrected over the years by several pharmacists. The manual contains instructions on how to deal with a variety of fevers, post-partum pains, period pains, on how to protect a pregnancy and avoid miscarriage, how to cure angina, dysentery, burns ("secreto per le scottature"), a recipe to induce vomiting, to treat sore throats, to induce lactation, cure tooth-ache, swollen testicles, chapped lips, concussions, to treat a variety of wounds (neck, chest, stomach, etc.), tinnitus, and "foco" (probably shingles, called "fuoco di san Antonio"), among many others. An alphabetical index of all these maladies can be found at the end.

Interestingly, the binding is made of earlier books and documents: the covers from a recycled twelfth-century manuscript, with some letters in black and red ink still visible, and the spine was reinforced with a parchment papal bull dated 6th of November, 1554. A mention of the Bizzardi store in Modena (f. 56r) might situate the manuscript around that area.