[Rarebooks] fa: THE ABSORBENT SYSTEM & LACTEAL VESSELS 1784 - LANDMARK OF ANATOMY

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with other 17th, 18th, & 19th-century titles, auctions ending Sunday, Sept. 23. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/cp3phyz

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


John Sheldon: The History of the Absorbent System, Part the First [all published]. Containing the Chylography, or Description of the Human Lacteal Vessels, with the Different Methods of Discovering, Injecting, and Preparing them, and the Instruments Used for these Purposes. Illustrated by Figures, by John Sheldon, Surgeon, F.R.S. Professor of Anatomy in the Royal Academy of Arts, and Lecturer of Anatomy, Physiology and Surgery. London: Printed for the Author, And may be had at his House in Great Queen-Street, Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields, MDCCLXXXIV [1784]. FIRST EDITION. Folio (35 x 28 cm; 13.5 x 11 in) in ribbed burgundy cloth, recently rebacked in goatskin with gilt-stamped spine label; [2], ii, [6], vi, 52, [14] p.; six leaves of engraved plates (complete), woodcut diagram; errata leaf, list of subscribers. ESTC T154153.

Though subtitled "Part the First," this was the only part ever published. Each plate is accompanied by a page of explanatory text. A landmark work, containing the first anatomical representations of the lacteals. Also of interest for its description of the embalming and preservation techniques (injections of quicksilver, etc.) perfected by the great anatomists William and John Hunter. The book is dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, and the list of subscribers includes Banks, Thomas Beddoes, John Hunter, Antonio Scarpa, and many other prominent men of science and medicine. John Sheldon (1752-1808), a student of John and William Hunter, was a gifted anatomist and embalmer who pursued his craft to the point of eccentricity, if not mania: when his mistress died of phthisis, he dissected and embalmed her, displaying her body in a glass cabinet in his bedroom until the woman he later married turned her out, donating her to the Royal College of Surgeons. Brilliant but increasingly erratic, Sheldon was incapacitated by a "brain fever" in 1787, three years after the present work was published.

Faint institutional ink-stamps to the title-page and fairly unobtrusive stamps to the plates; bound without the half-title; plates foxed to varying degrees (mostly light), with some dust-soiling and toning to the margins, some fore-edges a bit frayed and soiled; otherwise contents quite clean and fresh, firmly bound.