Florilegio Medicinal de todas las enfermedades by Esteyneffer, Juan de (1614-1716) - 1978

2 volumes: xxiii+537 pages with facsimile title page from the first edition; xii+[538]-972 pages with bibliography, glossary and index. Errata laid in. Inscribed by the editor, Maria del Carmen Anzueres y Bolanos to George M Foster. La Historia de la Medicina en Mexico, Coleccion Nuestros Clasicos number 2. Limited to 1000 copies. 1st edition thus.

Juan de Esteyneffer (March 4, 1664 – 1716) was a Moravian German lay Jesuit missionary sent to the New World. He is known for his 1711 work Florilegio Medicinal, which compiled a combination of New World traditional medicine, European materia medica, and 18th-century European medical diagnosis. Esteyneffer was born in Iglau, Moravia. His original German name is unclear; Juan de Esteyneffer was its rendering in Spanish, and the last name is also variously given as Steinhöfer, Steinheffer, Steinhofer, Steineffer, or Estainefer. He joined the Jesuits on September 27, 1686, and studied pharmacy in Brno. He was sent to the Jesuit College at Chihuahua to help care for elderly and ill missionaries. While there, he compiled the Florilegio Medicinal, completing it in 1711, with a first publication in 1712. It was reprinted in Amsterdam (1719), Madrid (1729) again in Madrid (1755), Mexico (1887) and this edition (1978). The work combined traditional European and New World medical lore with what was then modern medical science, and anthropologist Margarita Artschwager Kay notes that it served to standardize herbal therapy in Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States.

George McClelland Foster, Jr born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on October 9, 1913, died on May 18, 2006, at his home in the hills above the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as a professor from 1953 to his retirement in 1979, when he became professor emeritus. His contributions to anthropological theory and practice still challenge us; in more than 300 publications, his writings encompass a wide diversity of topics, including acculturation, long-term fieldwork, peasant economies, pottery making, public health, social structure, symbolic systems, technological change, theories of illness and wellness, humoral medicine in Latin America, and worldview. The quantity, quality, and long-term value of his scholarly work led to his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1976. Virtually all of his major publications have been reprinted and/or translated. Provenance from the executor of Foster's library laid in.

Condition:

Foster's underlining and occasional note through out, light edge wear, some corners creased, inscribed on front end paper volume one, spines sunned else a very good set.