Boerhaave, Praxis Medica Boerhaaveana

This is the companion volume to the Aphorisms and the more practical of the two. Where Boerhaave's aphorisms state what a disease is and what it requires, this book supplies the prescription for each section, section by section, so that a practitioner could move from diagnosis to the compounding of a remedy without leaving the page. Archibald Pitcairne's method of writing formulas is appended, and the title carries the motto from Celsus that what matters is not what causes a disease but what removes it.

The date of Redman's inscription, 1743, places it three years before he bought the Edinburgh Aphorisms and while he was still a young practitioner. Taken together the two volumes show the method arriving in his hands in the right order: first the prescriptions a working physician needed, then, as a student abroad, the theory behind them. Both were in the library of the physician to whom Benjamin Rush was bound apprentice in 1761, and both teach the system of depletion that Rush would carry to its extreme in the epidemic of 1793.

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