A Cure for Serpents A Cure for Serpents A Cure for Serpents: A Doctor in Africa is a 1955 travel book by Alberto Denti di Pirajno, later the Duke of Pirajno, an Italian doctor, writer and former colonial governor of Tripoli. Set in Libya, Ethiopia and Somaliland, the book is a collection of anecdotes about various places he visited in his work as a physician in North Africa in the 1920s and the people he met, which includes tribal chieftains, Berber princes, courtesans and Tuareg tribesmen and of a lioness, which became part pet and part guard. The book was translated into English in
Christ with a Staff "Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul" - these may have influenced this work. In an image by the copper-plate engraver Schelte a Bolswert, after a drawing by Gerard Seghers, St James the Less is shown with a book. The work is first mentioned in 1836, when it was in the collection of Christopher Bethell-Codrington. When his estate was auctioned on 12 May 1843 it was sold for £252 to the art dealer Christianus Johannes Nieuwenhuys. On 11 December 1854 it was sold at auction for 13,000 francs to count Raczyński from the collection of 'baron de Mecklembourg' in Paris. In 1898