The Medical Mirror, or Treatise on the Impregnation of the Human Female, Shewing the Origin of Diseases And the Principles of Death.

SIBLY, Ebenezer.

$12,000.00

Item Number: 129707

London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by all Booksellers in Town & Country, c. 1798.

Scarce early printing of Sibly’s The Medical Mirror. Octavo, bound paper-covered boards, illustrated with engraved frontispiece, vignette title page and 13 anatomical plates engraved by W. Newman. New Edition with large Additions. In very good condition. Bound into a three-ring medical binder. Exceptionally rare, with only a handful of copies having appeared at auction in the last 80 years.

English physician, astrologer and writer on the occult Ebenezer Sibly is best known for his New and Complete Illustration of the Celestial Science of Astrology, published in four volumes in 1784. The work, which had later editions under various titles, gave details of magical procedure, and an account of the spirit world derived from Reginald Scot, in the 1665 edition of Discoverie of Witchcraft. As a student of medicine, he became interested in the theories on animal magnetism by Anton Mesmer, joining Mesmer's Harmonic Philosophical School, and later also theosophy. The Medical Mirror contains a detailed treatise on the stages of human pregnancy followed by a treatise on the Principles of Life and Death and a list of cases in which Sibly's Solar and Lunar Tinctures cured a variety of maladies and conditions.