Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Doctor Luzzatto's British Pills for Bilious Complaints.

Here's one way the notable 18th century Hebrew poet Ephraim Luzzatto made money at his day job:



The ad appeared for several weeks in the London Courier and Evening Gazette November and December of 1794.

Here's a poem of his which someone translated from Italian:



Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser 11.19.1765

Here's the title page of his famous book of poems:



Unless his name was actually Ephraim Mordechai, then I'm not sure why his name is Angelo. Among Italian Jews "Angelo" was, and hopefully is, used for the Hebrew name "Mordechai," the same way "Zalman" is for "Shlomo." This naming convention is presumably based on Megillah 15a -- אמר רב נחמן מלאכי זה מרדכי ולמה נקרא שמו מלאכי שהיה משנה למלך.

Please see my prior post, A shocking doctor's prescription written by Ephraim Luzzatto.

4 comments:

  1. Wow ! You sure have done a great effort putting these websites in place. These tools sure are of great help. lidocaine

    ReplyDelete
  2. are you sure of the date of the ad? Ephraim Luzzatto passed away in Lausanne in 1792 (see David Mirsky for example).

    ReplyDelete
  3. These are both new pieces of information.
    As a matter of fact, Ephraim Luzzatto worked only shortly for the hospital of the Spanish and Portuguese community so scholars have already assumed that he entered the private practice for the rest of his stay in London.
    He was not very much connected with the community either, after having left the hospital, because in his will he left a sum fot the unpaid past fees.
    Thank you very much for bringing out new information!
    Where did you find the papers?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Glad to be of service!

    I got this from Gale's British Newspapers 1600-1900 database.

    ReplyDelete

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