Long Life, Short Art

humectants, emollients, stimulants, relaxants, suppurants, detergents, and cathartics substances causing purging or cleaning. He shows their use, selection, powers, dosage, and the measure of formulas according to indications, in order to explain their powers and constituent principles.

§. VII.

By fire and various solvents in the chemical college, through maceration, fermentation, distillation, solution, precipitation, compounding, and decomposing, the most celebrated master of nature, Professor JAQUIN, demonstrates to his students by sight. He calls the bodies of the three kingdoms to examination, not content with those things that exist among the most celebrated chemists, but with the greatest industry he clearly explains and teaches the genesis, mutation, and use of salts in particular, and the apparatus of simples in infusions and decoctions, along with all the rest, both of simples and compounds. And when these have been discussed in the academic halls during the winter, he invites his students to the delights of growing things when the sky turns to spring: he explains and shows the names, genera, times of flowering, and maturation of plants divided into classes, so that the entire supply of vegetation lies open to the eyes of the spectators.

Therefore, those who listen diligently and with attention to the explanations of these most industrious professors cannot fail to be confirmed in the most exact theory and the most faithful practice. From which it clearly appears that the Viennese Medical Doctrine, lightly sketched by me, easily holds the first place among the most flourishing Academies of Europe.

A woodcut vignette depicts a figure in 18th-century dress, possibly Mercury or a botanist, holding a staff (caduceus) and standing on a stone plinth. The figure is surrounded by shrubs and foliage on a small plot of land.