Establishes the medical and extractive setting from which later beverage-spirit practices emerged without treating period therapeutic claims as effective.
A synthetic historical account of an early European manual; the priority claim should be corroborated from specialist scholarship before publication.
English presents Hieronymus Brunschwig's 1500 Small Book of Distillation as the first printed manual devoted exclusively to distillation and emphasizes that it treated medicinal waters, botanical preservation, and extraction rather than beverage alcohol.
PDF sheet 62
PDF sheet 61
Chapter 2 — The Small Book of Distillation
Checked against extracted text for PDF sheets 61–62 during the complete 359-sheet review and against the sequential visual pass on 2026-08-26.
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