Examination of All Simple Medicaments Used in the Apothecaries' Shops

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Original title: Examen omnium simplicium medicamentorum, quorum in officinis usus est A Latin medical-pharmacological dialogue in which three speakers — a physician bearing the author's own name, an elderly apothecary, and a herb-gatherer — walk through the Apennines and examine, one by one, the medicinal simples stocked in the apothecaries' shops of Ferrara. Each substance is 'weighed' (examen, trutina) by collating Dioscorides, Galen, Theophrastus, Pliny, Serapion, Avicenna and Mesue against the thing itself, inspected, smelled, tasted and tested for adulteration, with discrepancies traced to faulty Latin translators, shopkeepers' profit, or degeneration of a species under a different sky and soil. Arranged in classed books covering flowers, herbs, seeds, fruits, roots, barks and woods, then juices, gums, metals, stones, gems, earths, salts, fats, marrows and oils, it supplies vernacular name-lists in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and the Ferrarese idiom, dismantles inherited marvels such as the pepper-serpents, the lynx-stone and the mandrake, admits newly reached substances such as guaiac, and rejects calls to abolish the Arabic authorities in favour of correcting them. It is dedicated to Ercole II d'Este and Renée of France, and its closing pages announce a sequel that would apply the same scrutiny to compound medicines. 👉 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.

• Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here
• View the original source file

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