De morbis puerorum et mulierum... [with:] Universae praxeos medicae. Institutiones. Mechanica exposita. Pars prima [-III]. [Medical Lecture Notes, written by Vincent of Cremona].

Bookseller Notes

A very good copy of this very interesting, apparently unpublished manuscript on the illnesses of women and children. It is a collection of carefully structured lecture notes, dictated by a physician to his medical students at the University of Naples. The teacher was most probably the same Pasquale Ferrara (or Ferraro) who was a practicing physician in Naples at least until 1801. He was the author of a work on sudden death (1766), where he analysed how it could be caused, among others, by coffee, chocolate, tobacco, syphilis and even by wearing wigs. The Wellcome Library owns a similar volume of notes (MS 1653), dictated at the University of Naples, dated 1671-1734. These also include the third work in the present manuscript - probably a traditional course - with similarly titled sections. The student Vincenzo Cremonese has remained obscure.The manuscript is divided into three parts. The first, devoted to children's illnesses, comprises conditions such as painful teething, epilepsy, atrophy, rickets, worms and issues controlling the bladder. Each is discussed in terms of symptoms, causes, prognosis and treatment, this last section providing recipes for medicaments. The second part, on women's illnesses, begins with an unexpectedly sympathetic comment on 'the miserable and unjust fate of women, who, destined to preserve the human species', are therefore plagued by numerous conditions related to generation. Like the previous, this work highlights the symptoms, causes, prognosis and treatment, discussing conditions such as menstruation (and its abnormalities), 'passio hysterica', difficult childbirth, miscarriage, the extraction of a dead foetus, and sterility. The third part is subdivided into the illnesses of 'natural regions' (e.g., digestive apparatus, appetite, nausea, burping, hiccup, colics, cholera), of 'vital regions' (e.g., angina, asthma, pneumonia, palpitations) and of 'animal regions' (e.g., headache, paralysis, convulsions, vertigo, erotomania, eye conditions and stammer). An important witness to medical education in 18th-century Italy.See Annali delle epidemie (1876), p.242.