Archipathologia … (Medical Textbook), Philothei Eliani (Elijah) Montalto, Paris: Apud F. Jacquin, 1614.

852 pp (9 x 6 1/2 in.; 227 x 165 mm). pagination: 18, 818, 16. Lightly browned; some scattered minor stains and foxing. Attached ms note to front free endpaper includes an entry from Voltaire's Histoire du Parlement du Paris (ch. 48), referencing Montalto. Limp vellum with semi-yapped edges, stained; minor tears and holes to front and rear boards; tear to head of spine with minor loss.

Harry Friedenwald, "Montalto," The Jews and Medicine: Essays, vol. 2 (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1944), 468-496.; Michal Altbauer-Rudnik, "Prescribing Love: Italian Jewish Physicians Writing on Lovesickness"  Korot; the Israel Journal of the History of Medicine and Science 20. Jerusalem:2009-10, pp. 99-116.

Philotheus Eliajus Montalto (1567-1616) was born to a Converso family in Portugal but fled to Italy to escape the Portuguese Inquisition. In 1606 he became physician to the Grand Duke Ferdinand of Florence and in 1611 personal physician to Queen Marie de Medici of France. Montalto accepted the position on condition he would have complete freedom to practice his Jewish religion and be exempt from professional service on the Sabbath. Marie de Medicis wrote to Pope Paul V to obtain the latter's dispensation to have an "infidel" at her service and a dispensation was subsequently granted. When Montalto died, it was the Queen of France who ordered that his body be conveyed to Amsterdam for a proper Jewish burial, His body was accompanied to its final resting place, the Jewish cemetery at Ouderkerk.by none other than Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira.

Montalto’s Archipathologia is a monumental work of more than eight hundred pages. The text comprises eighteen treatises, ranging from discussions of headaches, melancholy, mania, memory loss, insomnia, nightmares and epilepsy, even including a section on lovesickness. The entire book, written in Latin, was dedicated to the Queen of France, Marie de Medici. Dr. Harry Friedenwald, the quintessential historian of Jewish medicine, describes the book as “one of the earliest, perhaps the earliest, attempt at dealing with mental disturbances in a systematic manner.”