Mellificium chirurgiae, or the marrow of many good authors wherein is briefly and faithfully handled the art of chirurgery in its foure parts, with all the severall diseases unto them belonging: their definitions, causes, signes, prognosticks, and cures, both general and particular. As also an appendix, wherein is methodically set down, the cure of those affects usually happening at sea, and in campe, with other necessary to be known. And lastly, an addition of several magistrall receipts, approved, & heretofore kept secret. Gathered first for private use, and now put forth for publique benefit by James Cooke lover of physick and chirurgery.

London: for Samuel Cartwright, 1648.

First edition. Entered in the Stationers Register 12 January 1648. Nine more editions were printed up to 1717; the second edition was not published until 1662; the third, 1676, and latter editions contained a section on anatomy.

In his dedication to Francis Lord Brooke, Cooke says that he was ‘servant and Chyrurgion to your Noble Parents’. He does not have an entry in the Oxford DNB but is mentioned as ‘a civil war surgeon from Warwick’ in the article on Shakespear’s son-in-law, the physician John Hall (1574/5?–1635) whose Select Observations on English Bodies of Eminent Persons in Desperate Diseases (1657) he translated annotated.

This was the second book to be licensed by the College of Physicians under the powers granted to it in the 1643 Printing Act. The imprimatur is signed by the president, John Clarke, and the censors, Francis Prujean, William Rant, George Ent and John Micklethwaite. (The first was Rivière, Observationes Medicae (1646) and the next was Spigelius, A description of the Vessels in the Body which appeared in the English edition of Paré’s Workes, 1649.)