TESTIMONIALS

Of the Most Celebrated Physicians of the City,

to whom the censure of this little

work was entrusted.

Giovanni Benedetto Sinibaldi, Ordinary Professor of Practical Medicine at the Roman Athenaeum.

Large ornamental initial L at the beginning of the paragraph.

I have seen and read through with an attentive mind this book, whose title is A Physico-Medical Scrutiny of the Contagious Pestilence, written by the Very Reverend Father Athanasius Kircher of the Society of JESUS, a writer long since distinguished in almost every branch of the sciences and truly an Athanasius; and I assert that not only is there nothing lacking in it that pertains to a complete diagnosis of the plague, but I furthermore profess that it contains wonderful and hitherto unheard-of doctrines—doctrines as inaccessible to all others until now as they are patent to this one man, as if he were an Oedipus. Furthermore, it is a source of wonder how this author, otherwise lacking in the medical faculty—at least in regard to practice and profession—has written upon a subject that is medically very difficult and deeply abstruse so learnedly, royally, methodically, and esoterically, such that it is right for me to assert that no professor of medicine, even of the older age, has hitherto aimed his pen closer to the true idea of the plague. From our residence, the 15th day of August, in the year 1657.