Florilegio medicinal de todas las enfermedades: sacado de varios, y clasicos authores, para bien de los pobres, y de los que tienen falta de medicos, en particular para provincians remotas ... Reducido â tres libros, el primero de medicina, el segundo de syrugia ... El tercero contiene vn cathalogo de los medicamentos vssuales, que se hazen en la botica, con el mondo de componerlos by Esteyneffer, Juan de (1614-1716) - 1755

1755, Madrid, En la Oficina de Joachin Ibarra.

[32]+535 pages with indices. Octavo (8 1/4" x 6") bound in original vellum with hand-written title to spine and ties. (Palua 84238) Second Spanish edition, first published in Mexico (1712) and Spain (1719).

Juan de Esteyneffer was a Moravian German lay Jesuit missionary sent to the New World. He is known for his 1711 work Florilegio Medicinal, which compiled a combination of New World traditional medicine, European materia medica, and 18th-century European medical diagnosis. Esteyneffer was born in Iglau, Moravia. His original German name is unclear; Juan de Esteyneffer was its rendering in Spanish, and the last name is also variously given as Steinhofer, Steinhöfer, Steinheffer, Steineffer, or Estainefer. He joined the Jesuits on September 27, 1686, and studied pharmacy in Brno. He was sent to the Jesuit College at Chihuahua to help care for elderly and ill missionaries. While there, he compiled the Florilegio medicinal, completing it in 1711, with a first publication in 1712 (Mexico: Heirs of J. J. Guillena Carrascoso, 1712).

The work combined traditional European and New World medical lore with what was then modern medical science, and anthropologist Margarita Artschwager Kay posits that it served to standardize herbal therapy in Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States. The work contains much interesting information respecting the diseases common among the Mexican and Southwestern Indians, along with a discussion of the medicinal use of local plants and herbs, including a vocabulary in Spanish and the native Mexican language. The preface states that the work was prepared especially for the use of the Jesuit fathers in the provinces of Topia, Tapequanes, Taraumara, Sonora and California, which were without doctors or medical facilities.

Condition:

bottom tie broken, some internal soiling else about very good of a rare medical work.