Ioanne Prævotio Rauraco - (ALCHEMY & MEDICINE) Selectiora Remedia - 1657

IOANNES PRAEVOTIUS — SELECTIORA REMEDIA

Padua, Sebastiano Sardi, 1657

Selectiora Remedia of proven utility, which you may rightly number among the secrets of medicine.

A precious testimony of sixteenth-century medicine, between academic wisdom, pharmaceutical tradition, and therapeutic secrets of Baroque Europe.

In the heart of the Seicento, when European medicine was still suspended between the authority of the ancients and the new frontiers of experimentation, the University of Padua stood as one of the most illustrious centers of Western scientific knowledge. Precisely in this environment, where the legacy of Hippocrates and Galen met the intellectual restlessness of the scientific revolution, matured the medical experience of Giovanni Prevotio, Latinized as Ioannes Praevotius, author of the work Selectiora Remedia, published posthumously in Padua in 1657.

The title, translatable as Selected Remedies, proven by multiple uses, which may rightly be listed among the secrets of medicine, encapsulates the essential character of the volume: a collection of preparations, observations, and therapeutic procedures that aimed to preserve and transmit as much as possible of what medical experience had handed down to the practice of learned men.

This is not simply a pharmaceutical recipe book, but a testimony to the scientific culture of an era in which the boundary between medicine, botany, chemistry, and empirical tradition remained profoundly permeable.

## Giovanni Prevotio: the physician who guarded the secrets of nature

1585–1631

Jean Prévost, known in the academic world by the Latinized name Ioannes Praevotius, was born in Delémont, in present-day Switzerland, in 1585. His formation developed in the European cultural milieu of late Renaissance, marked by the influence of humanism, the rediscovery of classical texts, and a growing interest in direct observation of natural phenomena.

Arriving in Padua in 1604, he came into contact with some of the leading figures of medicine of the time, among whom Ercole Sassonia and Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente, famous anatomist and master of William Harvey, future maker of the modern theory of blood circulation.

The proximity to such figures places Prevotio in a remarkable season of the history of medicine, when knowledge of the human body began gradually to free itself from the unquestioned authority of tradition.

His academic career was particularly prestigious. In 1613 he obtained a chair dedicated to the teaching of Avicenna; subsequently he distinguished himself in practical medicine, until he held the role of prime professor. Upon the death of the botanist Prospero Alpini he was also entrusted with the direction of the University Botanical Garden of Padua.

This appointment has fundamental significance for understanding the nature of his work. The Padua Botanical Garden, founded in 1545, was not simply a place for cultivating rare plants, but a true laboratory of knowledge, where future physicians learned to recognize the therapeutic virtues of plant species.

Prevotio belonged, therefore, to that generation of scholars for whom the physician had to be simultaneously natural philosopher, plant expert, and observer of diseases.

His life ended tragically in 1631, during the terrible plague epidemic that devastated Padua and many northern Italian towns. The physician’s disappearance during one of the major health crises of the century gives his scientific legacy a particularly poignant significance: that of a man who devoted his life to seeking remedies against human suffering and who died during a calamity against which the medicine of his time had still insufficient tools.

## The posthumous publication and Sebastiano Sardi’s workshop

The edition presented here appeared in Padua in 1657, twenty-six years after the author’s death, at the typographic workshop of Sebastiano Sardi, as explicitly stated on the title page:

Patavii, Typis Sebastiani Sardi. M.DC.LVII.

Particularly significant is the circumstance of the posthumous publication, declared by the words Libellus Posthumus.

Indeed it was the author’s sons, Giovanni Battista and Teobaldo, who oversaw its publication, undertaking to deliver to readers a work the father had not been able to see printed.

Thus the collection also takes on the character of a familial and intellectual monument, destined to perpetuate the memory of a scholar who had already passed away.

The volume is dedicated to the illustrious Bernardo Nave, noble Venetian, whose presence on the title page recalls the system of relations among universities, aristocracy, and scientific culture in the Republic of Venice.

The dedication did not merely express deference. In Baroque Europe, the patronage of an authoritative figure contributed to the public prestige of a work and its placement within the social and intellectual networks of the era.

The edition thus also testifies to the editorial conventions of the seventeenth century, in which the transmission of scientific knowledge intertwined with family memory, patronage, and academic recognition.

## The content: medicine between experience and secrecy

The core of the work consists of a selection of therapeutic remedies, pharmaceutical formulations, and preparations for treating various affections.

The term Selectiora, i.e., “chosen” or “selected,” reveals the intention to distinguish the remedies considered most meritorious within a very vast patrimony of medical knowledge.

Equally important is the expression multiplici usu comprobata, with which the effectiveness of the preparations is claimed on the basis of repeated experiences of use.

Naturally, this conception of proof differed profoundly from the experimental criteria of contemporary medicine. It does, however, bear witness to the value that Seicento physicians attributed to clinical observation and to the transmission of therapeutic experiences.

Among the subjects addressed are remedies against gout, epilepsy, certain skin diseases, and other illnesses, alongside preparations based on the use of plant, mineral, and composite substances obtained through distillation procedures.

Particularly interesting is the reference to so-called secreta medica.

In Renaissance and Baroque culture, the term “secret” did not necessarily indicate a mysterious or esoteric practice. It often designated a preparation of particular reputation, a recipe guarded within a professional tradition, or a procedure transmitted by a doctor, by a family, or by a court environment.

Collections of secrets were a very widespread literary genre, in which genuinely empirical knowledge, traditional remedies, and concepts now scientifically outdated coexisted.

Prevotio’s collection belongs to this cultural universe, but stands out for the academic prestige of its author and for its attempt to bring such knowledge within a learned medical tradition.

## Between alchemy, botany, and the scientific revolution

To fully understand the meaning of Selectiora Remedia, one must remember that in the XVII century pharmacy had not yet assumed the characteristics of the modern pharmaceutical industry.

The physician and the apothecary operated in a world in which natural substances were subjected to maceration, distillation, combustion, and combination according to procedures handed down from Galenic tradition and chemical medicine.

The influence of Paracelsus, physician and philosopher of the sixteenth century, had helped spread interest in the therapeutic properties of mineral compounds and the use of chemistry in the preparation of medicines.

Prevotio’s collection testifies to this meeting ground of different conceptions of nature, in which the knowledge of the ancients continued to live alongside new experimental practices.

In the pages dedicated to chemical remedies one encounters references to vitriol and other substances whose preparation required elaborate procedures.

These recipes should not be considered direct precursors of modern pharmacology, but documents of a decisive phase in its long evolution.

It is precisely in this tension between tradition and innovation that one of the most fascinating aspects of the work resides.

## An astonishing episode: Elizabeth of Hungary

Among the more curious testimonies in the volume is the reference to a preparation connected with Elizabeth, Queen of Hungary.

The work indeed reports a tradition concerning an elderly sovereign, afflicted by infirmities and gout, who would have received a remedy of extraordinary virtues.

The tale fits into the famous legend of the Queen of Hungary’s Water, an aromatic preparation traditionally associated with rosemary and surrounded, through the centuries, by stories of its supposed rejuvenating properties.

According to one version of the legend, the queen, now advanced in years, would have regained health and beauty to such an extent as to arouse the marital interest of a king of Poland.

The value of this narrative does not lie in its historical reliability, highly problematical, but in the extraordinary cultural fortune of the remedies attributed to illustrious figures.

The presence of such a tale within the Selectiora Remedia reveals how medicine in the Seicento was still traversed by legendary traditions, court testimonies, and stories of exceptional cures.

The promise of restoring vigor to old age represented, then as now, one of humanity’s deepest aspirations.

## The typographic and decorative apparatus

From a material point of view, the work exhibits the characteristics of seventeenth-century scientific book production, in which clarity of typographic composition generally prevailed over the richness of illustration.

The frontispiece is enclosed within a sober linear frame and organized through a careful alternation of Roman and italic types, with different type sizes intended to emphasize the title, the author’s name, and editorial indications.

The decoration appears minimal, entrusted to small ornamental friezes and to initial woodcuts.

In the preliminary pages one observes an decorated initial letter, expression of that decorative tradition that continued to survive in scientific printing even when practical needs demanded a restrained editorial style.

From the pages examined, there are no plates or scientific engravings of particular complexity. It would therefore not be correct to attribute to the volume an elaborate iconographic program or the intervention of a specific artist without further documentary testimony.

Its bibliographic beauty lies rather in the sobriety of the composition, the balance of the page, and the authenticity of a typography designed to convey knowledge of immediate professional usefulness.

The presence of an index and an errata list also testifies to the care reserved for consultation and correction of the text, particularly important aspects in a work containing medicinal formulations.

## Fortune and historical meaning

The Selectiora Remedia fit into the broader editorial fortune of Prevotio’s works, whose medical production continued to be published and reprinted after his death.

The collection knew at least one more Padovan edition in 1658, printed by Matteo Cadorini, confirming the continuation of its editorial circulation.

However, it is not possible to attribute to this specific treatise a revolutionary influence on European medicine comparable to that exerted by the great anatomical and physiological works of the period.

Its importance lies chiefly in the testimony it offers about seventeenth-century therapeutic practice and the persistence of medical knowledge in which academic authority, professional experience, and pharmaceutical traditions were closely connected.

For the history of medicine, such collections allow us to reconstruct not only what doctors knew, but also what they considered effective, which diseases they sought to cure, and which substances they deemed worthy of attention.

For the collector, the work also presents the particular charm of small-format scientific publications, designed for reading and consultation, in which the material memory of a medicine deeply different from ours survives.

## Conclusion

Ioannes Prevotio’s Selectiora Remedia represents a significant testimony to European medical culture of the seventeenth century, born in the environment of one of the continent’s most prestigious universities and handed to the press through the devotion of the author’s sons.

Among botanical remedies, chemical preparations, therapeutic observations, and stories transmitted by tradition, the volume returns an image of a scientific world still seeking a balance between the heritage of the ancients and the new possibilities offered by experience.

Its value lies not only in the knowledge it preserves, but in its ability to tell the story of an era in which medicine was at once science, art, tradition, and an incessant interrogation of nature’s secrets.

Almost four centuries after publication, this work thus continues to bear witness to one of the oldest and most universal aspirations of human ingenuity: to understand the hidden virtues of the natural world and to transform knowledge into a tool of healing and relief from suffering.

Collation and state of preservation: 21pp, (200pp) Excellent preservation, pages fresh; to be noted that many pages are trimmed at the lower and upper margins, and thus some are smaller than others but without affecting the text.