Opiologia, or A Treatise on Opium Drawn Up According to the Mind of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum

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Original title: Opiologia ad mentem Academiae Naturae Curiosorum A scholastic-iatrochemical medical monograph in Latin devoted entirely to a single simple, opium. Confronting the paradox that opium was at once the most potent remedy and a feared poison, the treatise seeks to discipline this tension by asking how a physician might rightly know, prepare, and administer the drug. It offers a formal real definition of opium as the condensed juice of the wounded poppy heads acting by vaporous effluvia; overturns the Galenic verdict that opium is cold, judging instead that it acts through heat, on the basis of chemical analysis at the furnace; explains sleep as the corpuscular obstruction of the brain's pores; advances a signature doctrine that opium can act only when the blood holds a proportioned serum; defends opium against its reputation as a poison by distinguishing poisons properly from improperly so called; and narrows pharmaceutical correctio to chemical depuratio. It also contains an extensive philological and ethnographic discussion of Oriental names for opium and related substances (maslach, beng), drawing on Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Chaldee, Hungarian, Turkish, and Persian material. The work is dedicated to the program of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum, to which Wedel was admitted under the cognomen Hercules II. 👉 Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here 📜 View the original source file This text was transcribed and translated as part of the ExLatinis project—an effort by Leo to make English translations of every published text in Latin in early modern Europe (between 1450 and 1750) available to the public for free online.

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GEORGII WOLFGANGI WEDELII MED. DOCTORIS, PROFESSORIS PUBLICI, ET MEDICI DUCALIS SAXONICI, OPIOLOGIA Biblioth. S. Pan salernis Schol. Diar ad mentem Academie Naturæ Curiosorum JENÆ, JOHANNIS FRITSCHII Bibliopolæ Lipsiensis. TTPIS SAMUELIS KREBSII. ANNO M DC CIXIV. [STAMPS: ] [STAMPS: ]