The Second Part of the Popular Errors
By Laurent Joubert; Translated by Gregory David de Rocher
University of Alabama Press
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.
Laurent Joubert was one of the most important medical humanists of the later 16th century, serving as counselor and physician to successive French kings as chancellor of the medical faculty of the University of Montpelier. His Erreurs Populaires [Popular Errors] went through many editions and reprinting, and the book was cited and imitated throughout Europe. Gregory David de Rocher published the first part of Popular Errors in 1989 [and] in this second volume, Joubert treats a wide range of topics. Food and drink, evacuations and bloodletting, heat and cold, are among the main areas covered [and] there are additional essays on the attitude of patients towards physicians, as well as a large collection of popular sayings. Also appended are important essays on poisons, supposedly miraculous abstinence from food, the language of the deaf, the health of princes. Taken together with the earlier volume, this is an invaluable edition of an important work.'
—Social History of Medicine
'de Rocher has made available in a clear, well annotated translation an important source of 15th-century medical belief and practice, which is a fine companion to his first volume of the Popular Errors.'
—Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Gregory David de Rocher is Professor of Romance Languages and Classics, The University of Alabama
