The Second Part of the Popular Errors

Laurent Joubert (1529-1582) was a prominent physician in Renaissance France. Joubert was an educator as well as a physician, and one of his primary goals was to dispel the rampant misinformation associated with health care and caregivers of his day. The Second Part of the Popular Errors was to have been devoted exclusively to the discussion of a popular health regimen in the areas of personal conduct, the maintenance of one's surroundings, dress habits, and diet. Fortunately for us, Joubert included in The Second Part many topics intended for the balance of the original plan of thirty books. Thus, though with perhaps only a suggestion of what the treatment would have been had Joubert been able to bring his project to completion, we now have in The Second Part his main ideas concerning complexion, air and clothes, appetite and thirst, along with meals and digestion, the preparation and order of food, the importance of beverages, and, surprisingly, the problematic nature of wine in the diet. Food is again addressed in a section on the proper use of food during illness, followed by the importance of sleep. The only topic not covered is the one that came to interrupt Joubert's progress in 1582: death.