8vo. 128pp. With a half-title. Contemporary gilt-tooled calf, contrasting red morocco lettering-piece. Rubbed, joints split. Marbled endpapers, shelf-label of Cholmondeley Library to FEP, lightly spotted.

An early edition of the work for which physician and poet John Armstrong (1708/9-1779) is best known, the blank-verse georgic The Art of Preserving Health, first published in 1744. Over four books, on air, diet, exercise, and the passions, the poem eloquently considers the effects of disease upon the body. Though the practical directions for treatment are of little value, the macabre beauty and forceful phrasing of Armstrong's verse, particularly in his description of the plague, have been highly praised. David Hume said the poem was 'truly classical; the most Augustan thing we have in English'. It was frequently reprinted well into the nineteenth-century.