SILVATICUS (SELVATICO), Joannes Baptista.

De Unicornu, Lapide Bezaar, Smaragdo, & Margaritis: eorumq. in Febribus Pestilen. usu Tractatio.Bergamo, Comino Ventura, 1605. 4to. Title-page in red and black with a woodcut publisher’s device, 5 decorated woodcut initial letters (plus 2 repeats) and 5 woodcut decorations used as head- and tailpieces (plus 2 repeats). Seventeenth or eighteenth-century sprinkled calf, gold-tooled spine, blind-tooled board edges, later endpapers.

      (7), (1 blank), 160 pp. BMC STC Italian (17th cent.), p. 851; Ist. Cent. Cat. Unico (1 copy); Karlsruher Virt. Kat. (5 copies); OCLC WorldCat (1 copy); not in Caillet, Man. Bib. Occultes; Ferguson, Bib. Chem.; Garrison & Morton; Honeyman; Krivatsy; MacPhail/Mellon, Alchemy and the Occult; Osler; Rosenthal, Bib. Magica et Pneumatica; Sinkankas; Wellcome. Very rare first and only edition of a detailed Latin treatise on unicorns, bezoar stones, emeralds and pearls, with the emphasis on their medical uses. The result is an extraordinary mixture of medicine & pharmacology, natural history and alchemy & the occult. The book is not recorded in any of the major subject bibliographies in any of these fields. Nearly half the book is devoted to unicorns, especially the use of unicorn horn to cure many diseases including plague. He also mentions that Pope Paul III (1468-1549) bought a unicorn horn for 12,000 gold pieces. Much of Silvaticus’s material appears to be original, although he also repeats well known stories from Galen, Plinius, etc., such as Cleopatra drinking her pearl in a glass of wine. The book has no index, but the numerous printed marginal headings and summaries serve to guide the reader. The presswork does little credit to its printer, but it has lovely 34 mm initials decorated with grotesque figures and vines. The large publisher’s device (80 x 68 mm) shows a naked figure of “Bona Fortuna” in a scrollwork frame supported by two female figures.Joannes Baptista Silvaticus or Giovanni Battista Selvatico (1550-1621) studied medicine in Paris, but returned to his native Milan to work as a doctor and later professor of medicine. This seems to be the rarest of the several medical works he published in the years 1595 to 1615: the first and best known is considered the first treatise on feigned diseases.With a cancelled library stamp (ca. 1800) on the title-page. Foxed, but otherwise very good, with only a few minor marginal water stains. The binding is cracked at the hinges and the binder burned the leather with his overenthusiastic use of chemicals. A very rare medical-pharmaceutical account of unicorns and lapidotherapy.