pdf - Roger Gaskell Rare Books

SEVERINuS, Idea medicinae philosophicae
The Hague: ex typographia Adriani Vlacq, 1660.
4to: )( 4 A–2D4 (blank 2D4), 112 leaves, pp. 224. Typographic
ornaments on title, woodcut initials.
Two inserted leaves: 1 engraved leaf facing p. 1 and a letterpress table
facing p. 50.
196 x 150mm. Titlepage soiled. Occasional light foxing and
waterstaining but a good fresh and clean copy.
Binding: Contemporary calf, gilt spine. Joints cracked, corners worn,
front free endleaf removed.
Provenance: Faint old owner’s stamp ‘P. Dehordes à Bourbon Lt
(allter)’ [transcription uncertain].
First edition of the Prodromus, issued with the third edition of Severinus
Idea (Wrst 1571). Reprinted at Rotterdam in 1668. Bibliographia
Aberdonensis p. 387; Krivatsy 3067 and 11186; Wellcome II, p. 436;
Duveen p. 159; Neville I, p. 330 and II, p. 461.
This is the ‘Prodromus’ or preliminary treatise – massive though it is – to
Dav isson’s Commentary on Severinus, Idea medicinae philosophicae which was
issued by Vlacq in 1663. Owen Hannaway calls the Commentaria Davisson’s
‘most ambitious work’ which ‘marks Davison as a devoted Paracelsian
theorist, but by the time of its appearance it was somewhat outdated, since
iatrochemical theory had come to be dominated by the work of J. B. van
Helmont’. (For Pagel’s copy of Severinus’ Idea, the ‘Wrst major synthesis of
the Paracelsian corpus’ see my Catalogue 41, no. 115.)
The present Prodromus and the 1663 Commentaria are, Ferguson notes,
‘quite diVerent’. However, a number of commentators from Johnstone and
Robertson in Bibliographia Aberdonensis to Hannaway in DSB cite Ferguson
but ignore his note and state that the Commentaria of 1663 is the second
edition of the Prodromus of 1660. Interestingly the Prodromus was reprinted
in 1668 while there were no further editions of the Commentaria. Davisson
provided an index to both works in his Theophrasti Veridici Scoti doctoris medici
Plicomastix (1668), a work noted for being ‘the Wrst work printed in Aberdeen
for publication in a foreign country’ (Bibliographia Aberdonensis p. 416).
William Davisson was born in Aberdeen and emigrated to France when
his family fell on hard times, as he explains in the present work (p. 407), and
there married a fellow Scot. He may have qualiWed as a doctor at Montpellier.
He was befriended by Jean Baptiste Morin and in 1626 began lecturing
on chemistry at Paris and published his most important work Philosophia
pyrotechnica (1633–5), a wide ranging chemistry textbook. In 1644 he became
Wrst physician to Louis XIII and in 1647 he was appointed as the Wrst professor
of chemistry at the Jardin du Roi. This was the Wrst chair of chemistry in
France. He resigned this post in 1651 and became Wrst physician to King Jan
Kazimierz of Poland and keeper of the royal garden. He returned brieXy to
Aberdeen in 1667 and then back to Paris where Louis XIV ratiWed his patent
of nobility.
Some copies have a two leaf section of errata bound at the end, not noticed
in the Bibliographia Aberdonensis. It has clearly never been present in this