May 05, 2022 - Sale 2603
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Sale 2603 - Lot 45

Price Realized: $ 2,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 700 - $ 900
[Medicine & Science] Descartes, René (1596-1650)
De Homine Figuris.

Leiden: Petrus Leffen & Franciscus Moyardus, 1662.

First edition, quarto, woodcut printer's device to title; illustrated with numerous text engravings and woodcuts and ten full-paged engravings extraneous to collation (the plate of the heart missing one excised flap); bound in full contemporary unsophisticated parchment over boards with yapp edges, laced case construction, errata neatly corrected in a contemporary hand throughout in the margins, and then crossed out on the page of Notae at the end of the text, 8 x 6 1/4 in.

In this, the first published textbook concerned with physiology, Descartes understands the working of the human body as purely mechanistic.

Garrison-Morton 574; Grolier Medicine 31; Norman 627; NLM/Krivatsy 3120; Osler 931; Tchemerzine II, p.798 (describing two variants of the title-page, no priority mentioned); Waller 2376; Wellcome II page 453.
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