Traite d'Anatomie tome premier osteologie. A LHermitage, 1777.

£2,250 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

An attractive and unusual little volume of original essays on anatomy and osteology, addressed adoringly by the author, a ‘St Farre’, to his mother, and painstakingly illustrated with stencilled lettering and floral illustration. The text begins with a letter ‘a ma tres chere maman’, to whom St Farre dedicates the essays that follow which, he writes, are the fruit of her ambitions for him. What follows is a methodical series of essays on rudimentary anatomy, split into two sections. The first, ‘notions preliminaires’, lays the groundwork for the second section, ‘Traité d’Osteologie’. The essays are written almost as primers to particular areas of medicine; ‘Tome Premier’ on the title page suggests that their presumably young author, St Farre, had ambitions for further volumes. At a later point he explains that the five areas that make up Sarcology, or ‘soft’ parts of the human body, will be treated in their own separate treatises, distinct from this initial study of bones. We have been unable to find any such subsequent works, and the lack of volume numbering on the binding might indicate that this was the sole output. St Farre’s description of anatomy reveals that this manuscript was compiled at an interesting point in the development of scientific understanding of human biology and physiology in the eighteenth century; the transition from the so-called ‘pre-modern’, humoral body, to the ‘modern’ body, via ‘fibre’ theory. St Farre describes ‘fibres’ here as the basic buildin

• Year: 1777

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