I have been collecting some remarkable works on old and ancient medicine, alchemy and healing, and am compiling them into downloadable electronic books. These books are available for free download in PDF or HTML format. Click on the book covers to read or download the books that interest you.
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Enlarged 1653 edition with the New Dispensatory, colour illustrations and Latin index. Culpeper attempted to make medical treatments more accessible to laypeople by educating them about maintaining their health. Ultimately his ambition was to reform the system of medicine by questioning traditional methods and knowledge and exploring new solutions for ill health. The systematization of the use of herbals by Culpeper was a key development in the evolution of modern pharmaceuticals, most of which originally had herbal origins.
Culpeper's emphasis on reason rather than tradition is reflected in the introduction to his Complete Herbal, though his definition of reason was not that different from the Romantic philosophies of the era presenting nature as refuge. Culpepper paired the plants and diseases with planetary influences, countering illnesses with nostroms that were paired with an opposing planetary influence. Combining remedial care with Galenic humoral philosophy and questionable astrology, he forged a strangely workable system of medicine; combined with his "Singles" forceful commentaries, Culpeper was a widely read source for medical treatment in his time.
9th edition. Eminent U.S. homœopath, William Bœricke was born in Austria, on November 26, 1849. He studied for one year at the Vienna Medical School, before immigrating to the United States and settling in Ohio. After graduating from the Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia in 1880 he moved to San Francisco and worked as a homoeopath for more than fifty years. He was co-founder of the Pacific Homoeopathic Medical College of San Francisco and Hahnemann Hospital in 1881. This was incorporated into the University of California, where he became the first professor of Homoeopathic Materia Medica and Therapeutics, a post he held for thirty years. He died on April 1, 1929, of a massive heart attack.
In 1901 he published his Homoeopathic Materia Medica. It went through nine editions, this being the latest one.
Of Galen’s 600 books, just 20 survive. They were lost in the destruction of the library at Alexandria and in the general chaos associated with the collapse of the Roman empire. The Arabs captured and preserved some ancient medical texts during the golden age and expansion of the Arab Empire - only those works exist today.
Combined 5th and 6th editions. Translated by Dudgeon and Boericke. Homeopathy is a vitalist philosophy in that it regards diseases and sickness to be caused by disturbances in a hypothetical vital force or life force in humans and that these disturbances manifest themselves as unique symptoms. Homeopathy contends that the vital force has the ability to react and adapt to internal and external causes, which homeopaths refer to as the "law of susceptibility". The law of susceptibility states that a negative state of mind can attract hypothetical disease entities called "miasms" to invade the body and produce symptoms of diseases. However, Hahnemann rejected the notion of a disease as a separate thing or invading entity and insisted that it was always part of the "living whole".
Written in 1743 with chapters on curing wounds without pains, and without the application of remedies.
Herman Boerhaave was a Dutch botanist, humanist and physician of European fame. He is regarded as the founder of clinical teaching and of the modern academic hospital. His main achievement was to demonstrate the relation of symptoms to lesions.
His reputation so increased the fame of the University of Leiden, especially as a school of medicine, that it became popular with visitors from every part of Europe. All the princes of Europe sent him pupils, who found in this skillful professor not only an indefatigable teacher, but an affectionate guardian. When Peter the Great went to Holland in 1715, to instruct himself in maritime affairs, he also took lessons from Boerhaave. Linnaeus traveled to see him, as did Voltaire. His reputation was not confined to Europe; a Chinese mandarin sent him a letter addressed to "the illustrious Boerhaave, physician in Europe," and it reached him in due course. The operating theatre of the University of Leiden in which he once worked as an anatomist is now at the center of a museum named after him; the Boerhaave Museum.
1666 edition edited by Dr. Hemming with errata incorporated into text. Thomas Willis was an English doctor who played an important part in the history of the science of anatomy, neurology and psychiatry. He was a co-founder of the Royal Society (1662).