This study of the ipecacuanha root and its effects as a emetic, nauseant, expectorant and dispahoretic, Leibniz issued on what he called "the new American antidysentery drug" after reading about the root in Piso and Marggraf's Historia naturalis Brasilia (1648). The report is considered Leibniz's most comprehensive contribution to medicine. The printer of the work, Freytag, issued it in three different ways: As an appendix to Freytag's edition of Martin Lister's Sex exercitationes medicales de quibusdam morbis chronicis (Frankfurt, 1696), and also in Freytag's early periodical, Miscellanea curiosa, sive Ephemeridum medico-physicarum Germanicarum (Nuremberg, 1696). From that publication a separate pamphlet, or an early journal offprint, was also issued.

"Smith offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. He shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines.

"... Divine Machines takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here Smith reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. He casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, Smith provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era" (publisher).