The Second Part of the Popular Errors - Softcover

Joubert, Laurent

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0817354158 ISBN 13: 9780817354152

Publisher: University Alabama Press, 2007

Synopsis

English translation of the second volume of Laurent Joubert’s 1578 French work Erreurs Populaires

Joubert proposed to dispel folk remedies and folklore still relied on by doctors and care-givers in France. It also challenged medical theories and advice from classical Greek and Latin writers that French doctors followed uncritically.

Gregory de Rocher’s skill as a translator brings this highly readable and very funny book to life. Many topics central to Joubert’s thesis in the 1500s remain contemporary themes in the popular and scholarly literature of the 1980s.

About this title

About the Author

Gregory David de Rocher is Professor of Romance Languages and Classics, The University of Alabama

From the Back Cover

Laurent Joubert (1529-1582) was a prominent physician in Renaissance France. Joubert was an educator as well as a physician, and one of his primary goals was to dispel the rampant misinformation associated with health care and caregivers of his day. The Second Part of the Popular Errors was to have been devoted exclusively to the discussion of a popular health regimen in the areas of personal conduct, the maintenance of one's surroundings, dress habits, and diet. Fortunately for us, Joubert included in The Second Part many topics intended for the balance of the original plan of thirty books. Thus, though with perhaps only a suggestion of what the treatment would have been had Joubert been able to bring his project to completion, we now have in The Second Part his main ideas concerning complexion, air and clothes, appetite and thirst, along with meals and digestion, the preparation and order of food, the importance of beverages, and, surprisingly, the problematic nature of wine in the diet. Food is again addressed in a section on the proper use of food during illness, followed by the importance of sleep. The only topic not covered is the one that came to interrupt Joubert's progress in 1582: death.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0817354158
• ISBN 13: 9780817354152
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 332