Pena, Lazare de ( -1653)

Anatomie nouvelle [interpolated by a later hand: 'Du sieur de Pena grand Médecin à Paris'] de l'homme et des choses de Nature. On the verso of the title-page is an inscription by the same hand as that of the interpolation to the title: 'La minutte de ce Manuscrit me fut donné par Monsieur de St. Pons à l'article de la mort, il creut me faire un grand Présent, Ayant conservé très chérement cet ouvrage qu'il avoit eu de son oncle. C'est un dessein tout particulier, un ouvrage très sçavant, dans lequel il a cru donner quelque ouverture au sujet de la pierre des philosophes'. On the inside of the lower cover is a note by the same hand: 'Edimbourg. Le maior gnal [Neil?] buchan. Le Sieur canon. Le colonel gratin [Grattan?] et d'autres officiers'. This seems to be written by a middle 18th cent. hand.

Middle 17th century

1 volume 253 pp. 4to. 211/2 x 16 cm. Original vellum binding.

The papers are available subject to the usual conditions of access to Archives and Manuscripts material, after the completion of a Reader's Undertaking.

Purchased 1933.

The attribution of this MS. to Lazare Pena, Physician to Louis XIII, is doubtful, and no record of its publication has been traced, but it appears to be an interesting fore-runner of the ideas of the Abbé Pernety as expounded in his 'Dictionnaire Mytho-Hermétique' of 1758, and his 'Fables égyptiennes et grècques dévoilées' published in the same year. According to these, as Ferguson states in his 'Bibliotheca Chemica' s.v. Pernety: 'The whole ancient mythology is merely a long sustained allegory of the preparation of the philosopher's stone'.

Database description transcribed from S.A.J. Moorat, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts on Medicine and Science in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1962-1973).