A Miscellany of Medical Letters: Filled with Varied and Rare Erudition and with the Explanation of Matters Most Worth Knowing

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Original title: Medicinalium epistolarum miscellanea: varia ac rara cum eruditione, tum rerum scitu dignissimarum explicatione referta A Latin collection of eighty-three learned medical letters by the Palatine court physician Johann Lange, printed in quarto at Basel by Johannes Oporinus in August 1554 under a five-year imperial privilege. Opening with a verse address to the reader, an autobiographical preface, and an analytic table of contents (Elenchus et Argumenta) whose first entry attacks pseudo-physicians, the letters are addressed to correspondents and argue cases across a wide range of subjects: the crisis-days of fevers, the morbus virgineus or 'disease of virgins,' love-sickness, the sweating sickness, the antiquity of the French disease and its propagation by seedbeds of contagion, the maladies of miners and the vapours of mine-shafts, lead versus glazed earthenware water pipes, lycanthropy as a disease of black bile, poisons and antidotes, amulets and sympathy, judicial astrology, distillation and alchemy, polypharmacy and the errors of apothecaries and drug nomenclature, and the Phoenician and Carthaginian voyages in the Atlantic. Throughout, Lange refers disputed questions to philologically restored Greek texts (preferring Galen and Hippocrates to their Arabic-Latin translators) and to tested experience, while polemicizing against empirics, mountebanks, uroscopists, and other practitioners he condemns as unauthorized; the collection closes with a letter on the differences of signs and the priority of diagnostics over therapeutics. 👉 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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