Rosa, João Ferreira da | The first description of yellow fever

Rosa, João Ferreira da

Trattado unico da constituiçam pestilencial de Pernambuco. Lisbon: Miguel Manescal, Impressor do Principe Nosso Senhor, 1694

4to (190 x 145 mm). Engraved initials, headpieces, endpieces; marginal chipping to a few leaves not affecting text, faint dampstaining throughout, occasional contemporary manuscript annotations in ink. Contemporary limp vellum, manuscript short-title on spine, remains of ties; boards browned with a few stains, loss to upper portion of spine, remnants of translucent tape to lower boards, two leaves of index bound before the main text, edges dust-soiled, endpapers soiled. 

First edition of the first scientific book to describe yellow fever, written by the first European physician to treat the disease.

Practicing medicine in Pernambuco from 1686 to 1695, amidst the height of a strange and deadly epidemic known as "o mal da bicha," Portuguese doctor João Ferreira da Rosa recorded his observations on the disease. His insights and account of the first autopsy of a yellow fever victim make Trattado an accomplishment of Brazilian and colonial medical science.

Trattado is composed as a series of questions that forewarn and educate the reader of the signs of the disease, diagnosis, and treatment. Transmitted by or aedes aegypti mosquitoes, yellow fever ravaged the Carribbean before moving south and wreaking havoc on Bahia and Pernambuco. Borba de Moraes commented that Trattado "is not only of the greatest rarity but also of great scientific importance... Ferreira da Rosa submits here the first known accurate and clear observation on yellow fever... This is obviously a precious book not only concerning the history of Brazilian medicine, so destitute in medical books of the colonial period, but also for the history of medicine in general... Very few copies are recorded of this extremely rare book."

Rosa's Trattado would later be reproduced in part within Lima Leitão's Direcções sobre o conhecimento e tratamento da febre amarella and continued to be quoted in various medical journals centuries after its publication. The contemporary manuscript notes in the present work cite an article in the Gazeta of 1716 that mentioned Vigier's Thesouro Apollineo and made marginal notations of certain chapters.

REFERENCES

Garrison, History of Medicine, fourth edition, p. 272; Borba de Moraes (1983) II, 747-8; Borba de Moraes (1958) II, 216-7; Innocêncio III, 372-3, X, 252; Arouca R555; Barbosa Machado II, 658; Pinto de Matos (1970), pp. 290-1; Sabin 73167; Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, XLVIII (1972), 1343-5; Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales XV (Paris 1816), 334, 371; Goldsmith, Short Title Catalogue of Spanish and Portuguese Books 1601-1700 in the Library of the British Museum F154; McNeill, John R, "Mosquitoes on the Move" in Perspectives on History; Bulletin of the History of Medicine, John Carter Brown Library, Rare Americana. A Selection of One Hundred and One Books, Maps and Prints, 61