1770 JOHN ARMSTRONG Poetry ART OF PRESERVING HEALTH Verse MEDICINE Poems

  

Two volumes bound as one. Vii, [1], 216; iv, 279pp, [1].

Contemporary calf boards, recently rebacked to style, contrasting red morocco lettering-piece. Inked ownership inscription to head of title page, else internally clean and crisp. The first edition of the collected prose and verse of physician and poet John Armstrong (1708/9-1779), including the work for which is best known, the blank-verse georgic The Art of Preserving Health, first published in 1744. Over four books, on air, diet, exercise, and the passions, the poem eloquently considers the effects of disease upon the body.

Though the practical directions for treatment are of little value, the macabre beauty and forceful phrasing of Armstrong's verse, particularly in his description of the plague, have been highly praised. David Hume said the poem was'truly classical; the most Augustan thing we have in English'. It was frequently reprinted well into the nineteenth-century.

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