Second and best edition (2nd issue) of a detailed Latin handbook of pharmacology, written by the Leiden physician and lecturer in medicine and chemistry Christiaan Marggraf (1626-1687), first published in 1674 but greatly expanded by the author for the present second edition. The book contains hundreds of medicinal recipes, using ingredients derived from animals, plants and minerals (including metals), and is especially interesting for its attempt to classify medicines in hierarchical tables, just when John Ray in England was pioneering the hierarchical classification of plants that anticipated the Linnaean classification used today. The text is divided into four sections and is based on the physiological chemistry of Sylvius, which was beginning to displace the Paracelsian iatrochemical school, represented by Van Helmont, which had dominated medical chemistry for more than a century. The first section gives a general introduction and discusses the theory of both simple and compound medicines. The second discusses the preparation of ingredients. The third (with the hierarchical tables) and fourth (with most of the recipes) discuss compound medicines. There is also a 3-page table of contents and a 22-page index.
With nine pages of contemporary or near contemporary manuscript medicinal recipes and related notes on about 60 otherwise blank leaves that have been bound at the end of the book. Most leaves are browned and foxed and a tear in one leaf slightly affects a couple words of the text, but with no loss. The spine is dirty and slightly damaged at the head and foot. A good copy. BMN I, p. 358; Krivatsy 7438; Partington, p. 737, note 8; STCN (5 copies); Wellcome IV, p. 53; for Marggraf, see also John Powers, Inventing chemistry (2012), pp. 52-53.