Thorne’s book is less a medical treatise than a satire of the genre it imitates, larded with invented case histories that later scholars mistook, for a while, as genuine. The collation runs to nearly six hundred leaves, unusually large for an octavo of this date, reflecting the author’s evident refusal to leave anything out.
The binding is contemporary sheep, honestly worn at the extremities, with some worming to the lower margins of the final third of the book that stops short of the text. It is a sound, readable copy rather than a showpiece — most surviving copies are considerably worse.