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Science

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Science at Quaritch is broadly defined, ranging from medicine, anatomy, pharmacology (including herbals) and natural history to astronomy, physics, chemistry and mathematics.

An interest in the origins of modern chemistry has led to a specialisation in works on alchemy and distillation, and from there we have also branched out into occultism and hermeticism. We have developed an interest in gastronomy and books on nutrition and wine, an area which over the years has become one of our specialities.
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  1. [CHOLERA.]

    Bitte wegen der Cholera, welche bei den Gottesdiensten in das Schluβ-Gebet aufzunehmen ist.

    [Württemberg: s.n., 11 October 1831].

    Cholera, the ‘plague’ of the nineteenth century, affected large parts of populations across Eurasia and can be counted as one of the most devastating types of epidemics until today. The second pandemic of c. 1826 to 1841 swept from Mecca via Egypt to Europe, and reached Central Europe, and thence...

    £175

  2. [ANATOMY.]

    ‘Breve compendio anatomico’.

    [Italy, c. 1720.]

    A handsome set of apparently unpublished notes on orthopaedics by an anonymous medical student, compiled in Italy in the early eighteenth century, covering bones, cartilage, ligaments and muscles. The manuscript opens with a detailed analysis of the human skeleton, its bones and articulation,...

    £1750

  3. EYRE, Henry.

    A brief account of the Holt waters, containing one hundred and twelve eminent cures, perform’d by the use of the...

    London, printed for J. Roberts, 1731.

    First edition. The waters from Bath, Bristol and Holt, in Wiltshire, were the most popular English mineral waters of the eighteenth century, in no small part due to the activity of Henry Eyre, ‘Sworn Purveyor to Her Majesty [Queen Caroline, wife of George II] for all Mineral Waters’. Eyre ran a distribution...

    £450

  4. OSBALDISTON, William Augustus.

    The British Sportsman, or Nobleman, Gentleman, and Farmer’s Dictionary of Recreation and Amusement,...

    London, J. Stead for the Proprietor, and sold by Champante & Whitrow and at the British Directory Office, [c. 1792-6].

    First edition, issued in forty-two parts, of one of the first sporting dictionaries. ‘The pleasure and convenience of being well informed in the Recreations and Amusements of a Country Life, are objects of themselves sufficiently interesting, to justify the Author in presenting this Work to...

    £650

  5. AUGIER DU FOT, Anne Amable.

    Catechismo d’ostetricia per istruzione delle mammane di campagna composto per odine e a spese del...

    Venice, Stamperia Graziosi, 1787.

    Uncommon first Italian edition of this handbook of obstetrics, initially published in France at the behest of Turgot in 1775 and distributed gratis to French midwives.

    £550

  6. MARKHAM, Gervase.

    Cavalarice, or the English Horseman: Contayning all the Art of Horse-manship, asmuch as is necessary for any...

    London, Edward Allde for Edward White, [1616 –] 1617. 

    A beautiful copy of the second edition, ‘corrected and augmented’, of Markham’s Cavalarice, exceptionally well-preserved in a contemporary binding, from the library of the antiquary Sir John Marsham.

    £9750

  7. [APPERLEY, Charles James.] ‘NIMROD’, and Henry ALKEN (illustrator).

    The Chace, the Turf, and the Road.

    London, A. Spottiswoode for John Murray, 1837.

    First edition of a series of articles first published in the Quarterly Review, illustrated by Henry Alken. A sporting writer who ‘may even be said to have created the role of gentleman hunting correspondent’ (ODNB), Charles James Apperley (1778–1843) published widely on hunting and...

    £350

  8. MARKHAM, ‘J.’ [Gervase], G. JEFFERIES, ‘and Experienced INDIANS’, [and C.D. LESHER (editor)].

    The Citizen...

    Chambersburg, Thomas J. Wright, [c. 1839].

    Undated Chambersburg edition. Among the most popular farriery manuals in America, the Experienced Farrier remained in print almost a century after its first appearance, with this Chambersburg edition following those of Wilmington and Baltimore. Intended, like its predecessors, for the common...

    £250

  9. [BERKENHOUT, John].

    Clavis anglica Linguæ botanicæ; or, a botanical Lexicon; in which the Terms of Botany, particularly those...

    London: Printed for the Author. Sold by T. Becket, and A. de Hondt … and Mess. Hawes, Clarke, and Collins … 1764.

    First edition, dedicated to John Hope of the University of Edinburgh, and written with the assistance of Arthur Lee of Virginia, winner of the Hope Medal in 1763.

    £325

  10. [SACROBOSCO, Johannes de.] 

    CLAVIUS, Christophorus.  In sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco commentarius, nunc iterum ab ipso Auctore...

    Rome, Francesco Zanetti for Domenico Basa, 1581. 

    Third edition, the first to contain Clavius’s condemnation of Copernicus, with ten highly detailed woodcut diagrams of solar and lunar eclipses not included in the first edition. 

    £2500

  11. MARTINENQ, Jean Baptiste Thomas.

    Codex medicamentarius, seu pharmacopoea Parisiensis, ex mandato facultatis medicinae Parisiensis...

    Paris, apud Guillelmum Cavelier, 1748.

    Revised and enlarged edition (first 1638) of the Parisian pharmacopoeia, edited by the dean of the faculty of medicine at the University of Paris, Jean Baptiste Thomas Martinenq (d. 1758), this copy greatly enhanced by extensive critical and analytical marginalia by an experienced near contemporary...

    £2500

  12. ÉCOLE DE MEDECINE DE MONTPELLIER.

    A collection of eighty-seven doctoral dissertations presented to and defended at the Medical...

    Montpellier, various publishers, 1800–1810.

    An extraordinary collection, bound up very soon after the last was published, of eighty-seven doctoral dissertations presented to the ancient medical school at Montpellier in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

    £1750

  13. SCHRÖDINGER, Erwin, et al.

    A collection of offprints and papers from the library of Nándor Balázs.

    1902–1961.

    A remarkable collection of offprints and papers from the library of Hungarian-American physicist Nándor Balázs, laboratory assistant in the early 1950s to the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, comprising an exceptionally strong core of Schrödinger’s works – many of...

    £50000

  14. ORIBASIUS. 

    Commentaria in Aphorismos Hippocratis … Ioannis Guinterij Andernaciis medici industria velut e profundissimis tenebris...

    Paris, Simon de Colines, 1533. 

    First edition of this commentary on Hippocrates, bound with a richly annotated copy of Galen’s works in the translation by Thomas Linacre. 

    £1750

  15. WHITE, James.

    A Compendium of the veterinary Art, containing an accurate Description of all the Diseases to which the Horse is...

    London, J. Badcock and Longman & Co., and Canterbury, W. Bristow, [c. 1804].

    Sixth edition. Evidently a successful text, further editions appeared soon after the work’s first publication and would eventually be expanded into four volumes (the present edition is often found accompanied by The materia medica and pharmacopoeia).

    £225

  16. WHITE, James.

    A Compendium of the veterinary Art, containing an accurate Description of all the Diseases to which the Horse is...

    Canterbury, W. Bristow for J. Badcock, London, 1802.

    First edition of one of the first works on ‘the veterinary art’. With the formalisation of the increasingly academic subject of equine medicine and the foundation of the Royal Veterinary College in the late eighteenth century, the term ‘veterinary’ soon supplanted ‘farriery’, first...

    £275

  17. LAWRENCE, Richard.

    The complete Farrier and British Sportsman, containing a systematic Enquiry into the Structure and animal Economy...

    London, W. Clowes for Thomas Kelly, [c. 1816].

    Likely first edition, dedicated ‘to the noblemen and gentlemen of the Quorn Hunt’. Much unlike his earlier scholarly work on veterinary science, Lawrence’s Complete Farrier and British Sportsman is written for gentlemen and noblemen with an interest not in farriery but in fox-hunting,...

    £250

  18. LAWRENCE, Richard.

    The complete Farrier and British Sportsman, containing a systematic Enquiry into the Structure and animal Economy...

    London, W. Clowes for Thomas Kelly, [c. 1823].

    A sporting compendium, dedicated ‘to the noblemen and gentlemen of the Quorn Hunt’. Much unlike his earlier scholarly work on veterinary science, Lawrence’s Complete Farrier and British Sportsman is written for gentlemen and noblemen with an interest not in farriery but in fox-hunting,...

    £180

  19. [DEZALLIER D’ARGENVILLE, Antoine Joseph.]

    Conchyliologie nouvelle et portative, ou collection de coquilles propres à orner les...

    Paris, ‘chez Regnard, Imprimeur de l’Académie Françoise’, 1767.

    First edition, uncommon, of this pocket guide to the then relatively new craze for collecting shells.

    £400

  20. [HALKERSTON, Helenus.]

    Considerations on Man, in his natural as well as moral State. Being an humble attempt towards a plain, simple,...

    Edinburgh: Printed by A. Donaldson and J. Reid, 1764.

    First edition, a presentation copy ‘from the E[arl] of Mortoun’, the dedicatee.

    £600