‘EASY MEDICINE’ A CUTE POCKET BOOK OF MEDICINE, FULL OF REMEDIES, WITH A SMALL PHARMACY Charles Gabriel Le Clerc, La Medecine aisée, contenant plusieurs remedes faciles & expérimentez pour toute sorte de maladies internes & externes: avec une petite pharmacie commode & facile à faire a toute sorte de personnes. Paris: Michallet, 1696. [Easy Medicine, containing several easy & experimental remedies for all kinds of internal & external illnesses: with a small pharmacy convenient & easy to make for all kinds of people] Octavo: 22 unnumbered pages, 376, 56 pages. The binding is exquisite: full contemporary calf, showing remains of clasps. The corners are protected and the contemporary covers are blind-tooled with elegant designs. This is most probably Dutch or German. FIRST edition. The first edition, as here, seems very rare and no copies are listed in the US. The book is of a kind quite common during the period, and is designed to offer medical advice – or rather, advice on remedies to be used for various listed illnesses – to those in rural France. The author Le Clerc (1644-1700) is described on the title page as Conseiller-Médecin du Roi. The book includes a 56-page ‘small pharmacy’. A rather striking book which indicates the range of illnesses and cures present in late seventeenth-century France. Illnesses include tooth decay, maladies related to pregnancy, venereal diseases, various abscesses, fevers, melancholia, rheumatism, gout and the stone. The is the first of several editions of a popular work of medicine and pharmacy prepared by Le Clerc (1644-1700), which appeared again in 1698, 1700, 1703 and often thereafter. They proved popular and weere reissued and translated into English (with considerable editorial changes). T Bound in contemporary cold pressed calf on wood (probably Dutch), with remains of clasps. Ref: Krivatsy 6756. The first edition appears very scarce, with no copies listed on Worldcat.