Poison

Very Good Turkish, Ottoman (1500-1928) Modern cloth bdg. Marbled boards. Foolscap 8vo. (18 x 12 cm). In Ottoman script (Old Turkish with Arabic script). 83 p. Traditionally framed text. Very calligraphic head title in very decorative heart-shaped border and traditional flowers, a couple of scepters with two snakes. Orthography with 'haraka' [i.e. Arabic diacritics]. The heads of each chapter are surrounded by very decorative flowers and borders. An early printed lithographed book designed as a manuscript with its 'kataba' [i.e. imprint]. Slightly stained on pages, minor chipped on upper corners of two pages. Otherwise a very good and very clean copy. Lithographed edition. First and only edition of the first printed Turkish book on the antidotes and poisons. It's written by Mirliva Mustafa Hâmi Pasha, one of the early Ottoman physicists, during the reign of Sultan Abdulmecid II. Hami Pasha served as a military physicist, botanist, and doctor in the Ottoman army in the first half of the 19th century in Hejaz and Yemen. He joined an Ottoman Military expedition to Yemen. The aim of this expedition was to bring Yemen under Ottoman control again. On 23 March 1849, the expeditionary corps marched out of Jeddah. He as a trained medical man practicing in Yemen, also concerned himself with various illnesses. The existence of poisonous animals and plants in the book is mostly based on their experiences in Yemen and Hejaz. His purpose of writing this treatise which he started with prayer and praise to Sultan Abdulmecid II, was the need to explain that it is not good for all poisons, what the real antidotes are, contrary to the belief of a stone known as the "antidote stone" among the people. After the chapter of Muqaddima [i.e. Introduction], poisoning caused by mines and their antidotes is explained in the first chapter. In other chapters, poisons consisting of plant and animal substances, poisons in flowing and air, and in addition to these, the first interventions to be made with plants that have an antidote effect on drowning in water, convulsion, drowning by hanging, drowning from the smell of flowers, freezing are explained. Hami Pasha, who decided to collect this information in a book right after his participation in the 1849 Yemen Expedition (the flora and fauna in his book mostly based on Yemen and its around), printed his book as a lithograph in 1855 at the Amire Printing House, with the encouragement of Sultan Abdülmecid II (who read the manuscript of this text) and the efforts of typographer Muhammed Recai. Only one copy in OCLC in Aga Khan Library in London: 1124680097.; Özege 16131.