Today I thought I'd make my entry about a book. I have quite a few of them sitting around that are worthy of writing about, so I should space them out. This is a copy of 'Dictionnaire Botanique et Pharmaceutique' bound in calfskin and published in Paris in 1768. I've had this book since sometime in early 2008 thanks to eBay and my own inability to keep Christmas money for more than a month.
The book is entirely in French and is basically an alphabetical listing of any animal, vegetable, or mineral compound believed to have medicinal uses at the time. My favorite part of the book is that it was written before the current classification system for animals and even before the periodic table of elements was organized, so there's a little alchemical chart at the beginning to explain things. Here's a picture of part of it, though it didn't turn out very well. (EDIT: replaced my picture with a better one I found from an online scan.)
There are some very interesting things listed in the book, including cats (ground cats teeth are good for curing herpes), Mandrake (mixed with ammonia and tobacco eases the pains of childbirth), and Powdered Mummy (something about curing phlegmatic blood disorders that hasn't made sense in any language for two hundred years). It makes me very happy that now we have nice little pills and syrups and such for curing our ills.
I hope I never have to fill a prescription for Powdered Mummy. . .
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