“I Cornelius à Tilbourn”: Hotchpotches, poisons, antidotes and royal gifts. The career of a London irregular physician at the end of the seventeenth century.

The article tries to reconstruct the career of Cornelius à Tilburg, a London irregular medical practitioner at the end of the seventeenth century, grounding the research on the handbills distributed by this quack and still extant in two British Library collections. It particularly deals with Tilburg's advertisement exalting the miraculous efficacy of his "Orvietan", a drug of Italian origin not included in the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis by the London College of Physicians. The article also contains the translation into English of a previously untranslated passage from Andrea Mattioli's I discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli sanese medico cesareo, nelli sei libri di Pedacio Dioscoride Anazarbeo della materia Medicinale (1568).