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ENGLISH ILLUSTRATED ANATOMY FIRST EDITION. Small folio. pp. [8], 377, [1] + 4 folding plates, bookseller s ad mounted before title, long clean tear repaired. Roman letter, double column. Engraved folding anatomical plates (c.12cm wide), 69 full-page or smaller engraved anatomical illustrations. Age yellowing, mainly marginal finger-soiling, intermittent very light browning, minor repair to few blank margins, the odd ink spot. A good copy in contemporary Cambridge-style calf, triple blind ruled, blind-stamped fleurons to corners, raised bands, spine double blind ruled, joints, corners and foot of spine repaired, all edges sprinkled red. Copious mid-C19 medical notes and watermark sketch to eps and title verso, ms John Smith July 27 1843 , another unclear and price to title, a few more to verso of 3 plates (without see-through), ms Gibbon here from America 1844 to D1, occasional ms notes in Smith s hand on sundry subjects. A well-used, interesting and good copy of the first edition in English of this most influential, handsomely illustrated medical and anatomical compendium. The text ascribed to Bartholin […] is apparently culled from earlier material, which is fairly typical of compendia and translations compiling several decades worth of a single or multiple set of authors work published at a later date (Peterson, p.34). The illustrations were a big selling point, advertised in the title: With 153 figures cut in brass, much larger and better than they have been heretofore printed in English . Anatomy was indeed also a compendium of the history of anatomical illustration, most copperplates copied from major works such as Aselli s, Bartisch s and Vesalius s. A later owner of this copy was probably the physician John Smith Ashby, from Burton-upon-Stather, Lincolnshire. He annotated the eps and odd leaf in the 1840s. Once he noted a great snow storm, another the arrival of a friend, Gibbon, remarkably from America, and a few times he wrote down recipes for herbal remedies. The bookseller s advertisement capitalised on the genre by listing further such works on offer at George Sawbridge s, including some by Bartholin, Van Helmont, Culpeper and Salisbury s translations of Galileo and others. ESTC R24735; Wing B977; Wellcome II, p.107. Not in Krivatsy, Osler or Heirs of Hippocrates. Seller Inventory # L4055
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