Name/Title
[BOERHAAVE, Hermann]. Praxis Medica Boerhaaveana,Description
[BOERHAAVE, Hermann]. Praxis Medica Boerhaaveana, Being a Compleat Body of Prescriptions Adapted to Each Section of the Practical Aphorisms of Hermannus Boerhaave, Professor of Physick at Leyden. Publish'd from the Author's Original Manuscript. To Which Is Annexed Methodus Praescribendi Formulas, secundum Archibaldum Pitcarnium. London: printed for B. Cowse at the Rose and Crown, and W. Innys at the Prince's-Arms in St. Paul's Church-Yard, 1716.
John Redman's copy, inscribed and dated 1743.
Inscribed across the head of the title, "Ex Libris Johannis Redman," with the date 1743 in the same hand at the right. The title carries the motto from Celsus, that what matters is not what causes a disease but what removes it.
This is the companion volume to the Aphorisms and the more practical of the two. Where Boerhaave's aphorisms state what a disease is and what it requires, this book supplies the actual prescription for each section, section by section, so that a practitioner could move from diagnosis to the compounding of a remedy without leaving the page. Archibald Pitcairne's method of writing formulas is appended. It is the sort of book that gets used rather than admired, and its survival in a named copy is the interesting thing about it.
The date of Redman's inscription, 1743, places it three years before he bought the Edinburgh Aphorisms and while he was still a young practitioner in Philadelphia or newly in Bermuda. Taken together the two volumes show the method arriving in his hands in the right order: first the prescriptions a working physician needed, then, as a student abroad, the theory behind them. Both were in the library of the physician to whom Benjamin Rush was bound apprentice in 1761, and both teach the system of depletion that Rush would carry to its extreme in the epidemic of 1793.
Condition and collation to be recorded.