| Item Description: | Michael Laird, bookseller, description: Removed from a bound nonce volume, with early inked pagination (pp. 33-96) in upper margins. Final page with ink offset from what was evidently the title-page of the work that once followed it. Pencil marks on several pages. Very good condition, preserved in recent sympathetic comb-marbled wrappers. Boissier de Sauvages (1706–67), a botanist, medical doctor, and professor of physiology and pathology, discusses everything that was then known about the causes and treatment of rabies. He provides several very brief accounts of individuals who suffered or died of rabies. There is repeated mention of the use of electricity in the treatment of those infected. At the time of this writing, fiction was often mixed with fact in the accounts of cases of rabies. Boissier de Sauvages’ description in his "Dissertation sur la rage" provides one example: [Some] travelers, who were given meat from a pig with rabies by an innkeeper, straightaway became rabid and bit each other. This story was told by an anonymous author, and may not readily be believed, but with respect to this disease." This is the second edition, the first having been printed in Toulouse in 1749. Provenance: From the residue of the stock of the F. Thomas Heller bookselling firm (est. ca. 1928). Searches of WorldCat locate only one North American library (Univ. Minnesota). Of the first edition, we locate only one North American library (University of Montreal). |
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