Home / Browse / Philosophy & History of Ideas / A late Discourse Made in a Solemne Assembly of Nobles and Learned Men at Montpellier in France … Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy;
DIGBY, Sir Kenelm.
A late Discourse Made in a Solemne Assembly of Nobles and Learned Men at Montpellier in France … Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy;
With Instructions how to make the said Powder; whereby many other Secrets of Nature are unfolded. Rendered faithfully out of French into English By R. White, Gent. The second Edition corrected and augmented, with the addition of an Index.
Publisher: London: printed for R. Lowndes, and T. Davies, 1658
Stock code: 47168
Price: £1,000 Currency Conversion
Second edition in English, same year as the first, a translation of a lecture delivered to a congress of French virtuosi, giving Digby's complex mechanical explanation of the "sympathetic powder", a Paracelsian weapon-salve which was applied to the weapon that inflicted the wound, rather than to the patient. Exiled in Paris after the English civil war, Digby studied chemistry under the Scottish royal physician, William Davidson. He had "cured his friend James Howell, then the duke of Buckingham's secretary, of a sword-cut in the hand by dissolving some powdered vitriol crystals in water and plunging into the mixture a cloth stained with blood from the wound. The pain in Howell's hand, some yards away, immediately ceased … Many were convinced by Digby's evidence, including Joseph Glanvill, later a Royal Society fellow, and Nathaniel Highmore, a distinguished anatomist and friend of William Harvey. In fact the cure lay in washing and bandaging the wound" (ODNB).
Duodecimo (139 × 75 mm). Contemporary unlettered sheep sewn on two cords, unlined, double blind rules. Engraved bookplate of William Tempest of the Inner Temple, 1702, to blank A3v; 1900 ownership inscription to initial blank. With final index and advert leaf. Spine restored at head and tail, corners worn, title leaf with small tear in gutter costing one letter and small part of typographic frame, fore edge of same leaf a little frayed, a little light spotting, still a good copy.
