Institutiones medicae, Boerhaave’s first book, represented lectures given by Boerhaave on June 23, 1701; it was soon being used in virtually every medical school in Europe, going though numerous authorized and unauthorized editions and translations. It was one of the earliest modern textbooks of physiology, and was responsible, more than any other work, for establishing the study of physiology as an academic discipline. Boerhaave wrote the work to serve as the textbook for his course in the institutes of medicine, a discipline including pathology, symptoms, hygiene and therapeutics as well as physiology, but he apparently felt that physiology was a neglected subject in the curriculum, as his chapter on it was larger than the other four chapters combined, and the only one to contain footnotes. The Institutiones is also significant as a work of medical bibliography, introducing its readers to the medical literature of the past and present through Boerhaave’s numerous detailed bibliographical citations. Because of its unusually large number of book recommendations, Boerhaave's extremely influential text may have influenced many of his students to collect libraries of the works which he deemed classical and significant. That some books might have been printed a century or more before the lectures were given does not seem to have been a critical issue. Lindeboom, Bibliographia Boerhaaviana (1959) No. 40. Lindeboom lists 50 different editions and translations of this work, including a manuscript translation into Arabic made in 1733.

The work was translated into English by "Mr. Samber" and published in London in 1719 under the following title: A Method of Studying Physick. Containing What a Physician ought to know in Relation to the Nature of Bodies, the Laws of Motion; Staticks, hydrostaticks, Hydraulicks, and the Proprieties of Fluids: Chymistry, Pharmacy and Botany: Osteology, Myology, Splanchnology, Angiology and Dissection: The Theory and Practice of Physick: Physiology, Pathology, Surgery, Diet, &c. And the whole Praxis Medica Interna; with the Names and Characters of the Most excellent Authors on all these several Subjects in every Age: Systematicks, Observators, Operators, & their best Editions, and the method of reading them.