Divers Traictez, a scavoir, de la nature des bains de Bourbon, & des abus qui se commettent à présent en la boisson de ces eaux…

Paris, Pierre David, 1651. Small octavo. Four works bound in one volume.

Second edition of Divers traictez, à sçavoir, de la nature des bains de Bourbon, & des abus qui se commettent à présent en la boisson de ces eaux, avec une instruction pour s'en servir utilement. De la Macreuse. De la Poudre de sympathie, first published by the same bookseller in 1650. The work opens with a dedication to Messire Baltazar du Mont, knight and Baron of Neufuy Saint-Sépulcre, with an engraved headpiece bearing fleur-de-lis arms. 4 unnumbered leaves, 148 and 56 pages, 2 unnumbered leaves.

Bound after it are:

Nicolas Papin, Nicolai Papinii Blesensis M. D. De pulvere sympathico dissertatio. Paris, Siméon Piget, 1650. 8 unnumbered leaves, the last blank, and 40 pages.

Nicolas Papin, La poudre de sympathie, deffendue contre les objections de Mr. Cattier, médecin du Roy. Paris, Siméon Piget, 1651. 4 unnumbered leaves and 56 pages.

Isaac Cattier, Response à Monsieur Papin Docteur en Medecine, touchant la poudre de sympathie, en laquelle est traicté de l'Esprit universel, & des propriétez de l'Ayman. Paris, Edme Martin, 1651. 87 pages.

Full dark green morocco, spine with five raised bands ruled in gilt dots and richly decorated with double gilt compartments, gilt rolls to the headcaps, boards framed with a gilt triple fillet, double gilt fillets to the board edges, gilt turn-ins, comb-marbled endpapers and pastedowns, all edges gilt. Engraved armorial bookplate mounted on one pastedown. An elegant binding signed by Krafft.

A very fine copy, handsomely bound.

This volume brings together, in almost immediate succession, the four principal texts in the controversy between Isaac Cattier and Nicolas Papin concerning the powder of sympathy. It traces the dispute from Papin's Latin dissertation, first issued in 1647 and reprinted here in 1650, to the two French replies exchanged in the following year.

The powder of sympathy belonged to the Paracelsian tradition of the weapon salve. It was applied not to the wound itself, but to the weapon that had caused it or to a cloth stained with the injured person's blood. The wound, merely cleansed and protected, was supposed to heal at a distance through an invisible correspondence between the body, the blood and the treated object.

The dispute therefore concerned more than the efficacy of a remedy. It raised the fundamental question of whether one body could act upon another from a distance. Papin defended the existence of a natural sympathy linking separated objects. Cattier instead tested such causation against medical reason and the principle that no agent can act where it is not present. The powder thus opened a wider debate at the borders of medicine, magnetism, natural philosophy and magic.

The controversy was further complicated by a bibliographical misunderstanding. Papin believed Cattier's discourse to be a direct attack upon his dissertation. In his Response of 1651, Cattier protested that he had not known Papin's work when preparing his first treatise. The present volume preserves each stage of this troubled exchange: thesis, objection, defence and reply to the defence.

This French dispute preceded by several years the discourse through which the English knight Sir Kenelm Digby gave the powder of sympathy its greatest European celebrity. Delivered before a learned assembly at Montpellier in 1657 and published in 1658, Digby's address considered the same problem of healing at a distance and sought to explain it through particles and the hidden mechanisms of nature. The Cattier-Papin controversy demonstrates that the subject was already dividing French physicians before Digby transformed it into a fashionable philosophical performance.

Cattier's remaining treatises extend this inquiry into the limits of the credible. His study of the baths of Bourbon belongs to the contemporary expansion of medical thermalism. Bourbon-l'Archambault then enjoyed the patronage of Gaston d'Orléans and the support of the court physician Charles Delorme, who attracted many distinguished visitors to the resort. Cattier considers the virtues of the waters as well as the abuses attending their consumption, seeking to regulate and rationalise the therapeutic marvels of the springs.

Still more curious is the treatise on the scoter, poised between natural history, gastronomy and theology. The aquatic bird had long been believed to spring spontaneously from seaweed, shellfish or rotting timber. Such an origin allowed it to be classed with fish and eaten during Lent. Du Bartas gave this belief its most vivid poetic expression:

"Thus the old fragment of a boat is changed
Into flying ducks, O wondrous transformation:
The selfsame body once was a green tree, then a vessel,
Lately a mushroom, and now a bird!"

Healing waters, a bird generated from timber and a powder able to close a wound without touching it consequently coexist within the same book. Yet Cattier does not receive them with an equal credulity. His writing reveals a medical culture in transition, still surrounded by marvellous traditions, but increasingly concerned to distinguish observation, authority and proof.

A rare gathering of the four principal texts in the Cattier-Papin controversy, preserved in a distinguished binding by Krafft. At the heart of seventeenth-century France, the volume captures medicine as it sought to bring the invisible forces of nature within the reach of rational debate, without having entirely severed its ties to the marvellous.