Published initially in 1684 and popular in both America and England for over two hundred years, this became the most widely reprinted medical book in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The contributions of the Masterpiece were not particularly scientific, but drew largely from Hippocrates, and Galen, as well as other classical and medieval writers. The source material came from two earlier books: Levinus Lemnius’s Secret Miracles of Nature, originally published in Latin in 1599, and The Complete Midwives Practice Enlarged (author unknown). Chapter headings include sections titled, “The Signs of Barrenness” “The Way of getting to a Boy or a Girl,” “How a Midwife Ought to be Qualified” and “A Word of Advice to both Sexes in the Act of Copulation.” The information this title offered on conception, pregnancy, and childbirth wasn’t particularly innovative; many seventeenth century discoveries in gynecology are absent from the text and replaced by Hippocratic pathology, or by superstition. The “Aristotle” of the title was pseudonymous, and likely evoked by the book’s author to give the tome scientific credibility. The book’s true author is unknown, though Culpepper and William Salmon, an English physician and author, are sometimes credited.

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