Oct 27, 2020 - Sale 2549

Sale 2549 - Lot 152

Price Realized: $ 2,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
FIRST MEXICAN MEDICAL MAGAZINE Bartolache, José Ignacio (1738-1790)
Lecciones Matematicas, que en la Real Universidad de Mexico Dictaba.
Mexico City: En la Imprenta de la Bibliotéca Mexicána, puente del Esp. Santo, 1769.

[bound with] Mercurio Volante, con Noticias Importantes i Curiosas sobre Varios Asuntos de Fisica i Medicina.
Mexico City: en la imprenta de D. Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 17 October 1772-10 February 1773

Quarto, the first with added engraved title by José Mariano Navarro (1742-circa 1809), engraved initials and head-piece, bound with twelve issues of the first medical periodical published in the New World, numbers 1-10, and 15-16 of the Mercurio Volante; bound in full contemporary sponge-decorated sheepskin with decorative gilt-patterned endleaves (minor wear, lacking spine label; some intermittent faint dampstaining, minor foxing), 7 3/4 x 5 1/2 in.

This Mexican sammelband of medical works includes a nearly complete run of Bartolache's Mercurio. The locally researched articles include one on the causes of hysteria in women (issue 6), and another on use and abuses of pulque as a medicine (issue 8). "Bartolache was ahead of his time in proposing sanitary and preventative measures [...] before there was knowledge of microorganisms and before technology had been developed to investigate and diagnose disease. Mercurio Volante represents an empirical, enlightened approach to the medical interpretation of women's experience of illness"--Beatriz Quintanilla-Madero, "An Enlightened Perspective on Hysteria in Eighteenth-Century Mexico," in Jaffe & Lewis, "Eve's Enlightenment," page 143-154.

I: Medina, Mexico 5286; Palau 25091. II: Guerra 379; Medina, Mexico 5491. None traced at auction.