1779 Antoine Portal First Ed Rabies Hydrophobia Medical History French For Sale

PORTAL, Antoine. Observations sur la nature et sur le traitement de la rage, suivies d’un précis historique & critique des divers remèdes qui ont été employés jusqu’ici contre cette maladie.

Yverdon, 1779.

First edition. Small octavo. [12], 130, [2] pages. Text in French.

A scarce eighteenth-century medical monograph devoted specifically to rabies, or hydrophobia, published more than a century before Louis Pasteur’s development of post-exposure vaccination.

Antoine Portal’s Observations sur la nature et sur le traitement de la rage is an important early attempt to examine rabies through clinical observation, medical history and comparative evaluation of treatment. The work discusses the nature and transmission of the disease, its symptoms, its effects upon the nervous system, and the numerous remedies employed against it before the emergence of modern infectious-disease theory.

The book is particularly appealing as a pre-Pasteur study of one of the most feared diseases in medical history. Once symptoms appeared, rabies was almost invariably fatal, and eighteenth-century physicians had no reliable means of determining which bite victims would eventually develop the disease.

Portal discusses rabies transmitted through the bites of infected animals, together with contemporary theories concerning spontaneous and communicated disease. He considers the symptoms of hydrophobia, the progressive effects of the illness, the nervous system, and observations derived from examinations of deceased patients.

The second portion of the book examines the remedies then employed against rabies, including:

• immediate treatment of the and mercurial medicines;

• other historical and empirical treatments.

Portal does not merely present these remedies as established cures. He evaluates them in the context of earlier medical literature and attempts to distinguish observation from traditional prescription and popular belief.

The volume concludes with a historical and critical survey of earlier writers and remedies associated with rabies. It therefore has interest not only as a medical treatise but also as a bibliography of pre-modern thinking about hydrophobia, contagion and animal-bite treatment.

The original French title may be translated:

Observations on the nature and treatment of rabies, followed by a historical and critical summary of the various remedies that have hitherto been employed against this disease.

Antoine Portal (1742–1832) was a prominent French physician, anatomist, medical historian and professor. He held important academic appointments at the Collège Royal de France and the Jardin du Roi and became one of the leading clinical and anatomical authorities of eighteenth-century France.

Portal was also the author of the substantial Histoire de l’anatomie et de la chirurgie and numerous works on pathology and medical treatment. His rabies treatise belongs to the period in which physicians were beginning to organize medical knowledge around clinical observation, pathology and comparative case histories, even though the microbial cause of rabies remained unknown.

This is the original Yverdon edition of 1779, complete with:

• title page with engraved printer’s vignette;

• preliminary notice and introductory material;

• main text;

• typographical ornaments and decorative tailpieces;

• concluding table of contents;

• terminal leaf.

The copy conforms to the commonly cited collation of approximately [12], 130, [2] pages. The bibliographical records of surviving copies can vary in the description of the preliminary leaves, so all leaves have been checked against the photographs and are present in this copy.

The Wellcome Collection records the 1779 edition as published at Yverdon and Paris by P. F. Didot, Jr. and Méquignon, and identifies it as a 12mo French medical work.

Later half vellum or parchment over attractive marbled-paper boards, probably dating from the nineteenth or early twentieth century.

The spine bears a red leather title label lettered in gilt:

M. PORTAL
OBSERVATIONS
SUR
LA RAGE

The marbled paper is especially appealing, incorporating combed and drawn patterns in blue, red, green, yellow and brown. The book retains broad margins and is substantially untrimmed, with deckled edges visible throughout.

Several old manuscript notations appear on the half-title, including what appears to be a Brussels location and a date in 1920. These may record a twentieth-century acquisition, bookseller transaction or ownership history.

The handwriting is faint, and no definitive identification of the former owner or bookseller is asserted.

Good antiquarian condition overall. Complete and securely bound.

The later binding shows moderate surface soiling, spotting and ordinary shelf wear. The vellum or parchment spine remains intact, and the red leather title label is attractive with light rubbing and minor wear. The marbled paper remains bright and decorative.

Internally, the text is generally sound, with dark and readable printing. There is old dampstaining, chiefly along the lower margins and varying in intensity through a substantial portion of the volume. There is also scattered spotting, age-toning, occasional handling wear, creasing and minor marginal edge wear.

The half-title is toned and soiled and contains several old pencil notations. The title page has staining and edge wear, including a small area of loss or old repair near the upper outer corner. Several leaves have small marginal tears, softened deckled edges or minor marginal losses. These defects do not materially affect the principal text.

Please study all photographs carefully. They are an important part of the condition description.

An uncommon and historically significant first edition for collectors of:

• history of medicine;

• rabies and hydrophobia;

• infectious disease;

• veterinary French science;

• medical history;

• pre-Pasteur medicine;

• early theories of contagion and treatment.

Books devoted specifically to rabies are relatively uncommon in the eighteenth-century medical literature. This complete 1779 first edition offers a substantial early account of the disease and its proposed treatments, preserved in an attractive later marbled binding with broad, substantially untrimmed margins.

A scarce first edition of an important eighteenth-century rabies treatise.