RICHARD C. RAMER Special List 161 MEDICINE

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richard c. ramer
Internally very fine; overall a fine copy. Contemporary manuscript
annotations on endleaves. (7, 1 blank ll.), 600 pp. $3,600.00
FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE, with preliminary leaf *8 blank, and without any
catchword on leaf *7 verso. The work is aimed at the layman who can read no languages
except Portuguese, but it also gives information on the medicinal uses of plants for the
benefit of doctors and pharmacists. A second edition appeared at Lisbon, 1817.
A great many of the entries are about plants, animals, and minerals that are found
exclusively in Portuguese and Spanish overseas possessions (Brazil, the Americas, Africa,
the Orient); many other entries mention special varieties of the item that are found in
those areas. Of the more than 220 examples of this, some are fairly well known: cacao
(p. 107), coca (p. 173), the giraffe (p. 267), and tobacco (p. 538). Most of the descriptions,
however, are of flora and fauna considerably more obscure, such as the aguila, a plant
from Indochina (p. 14), the angelim, a tree found in America (p. 42), the areca, a bird of
the East Indies, the burro de mato, an Ethiopian animal (p. 103), the nambu, a Brazilian
bird (p. 376), and the tamendua, an animal of Brazil (p. 545).
Monteiro de Carvalho is not an extremely critical writer, though he does refuse to
believe in centaurs, even on the word of St. Jerome (p. 154), or in the phoenix (p. 439).