AN undated medical volume offered as part of a May 8 antiques sale held by Fieldings of Stourbridge brought a bid of £430.
The main part of the book, I am told, included all sorts of
medical matters - including a cure for gum disease that involved
the removal of the teeth and application of sugar - but it was a
39pp chapter or section found at the end of the main text, called
Daimonomageia. A small treatise of sicknesses and diseases from
witchcraft, and supernatural causes..., that seems to have
attracted most interest.
There is, I gather, a reference to a relation of Mary Hall of
Gadsden, who was reputed to be possessed of two devils in 1664, and
I imagine that the treatise is a copy of the work by the apothecary
and medical writer William Drage that was first published in 1665
in his Physical Nosonomy..., but whether the Stourbridge volume was
a copy of this edition, or the work as it subsequently appeared as
The Practice of Physick, or Physical Experiments, I cannot
tell.
Back to top
Follow us on:
