Lettres de G. Desnoues, Professeur d'Anatomie & de Chirurgie.

£2,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

The first edition of this collection of the letters of French doctor, surgeon and pioneering anatomical wax modeller, Guillaume Desnoues (1650-1735). A surgeon in Paris, Desnoues was prosecuted for clandestine dissection and fled to Italy, first Florence and then Genoa, where he taught anatomy and surgery in the 1690s. Intended initially for teaching, as a longer-lasting alternative to cadavers, his “models circulated through Italy, France, Germany, Denmark and England at the very beginning of the eighteenth century”, and Desnoues became the first to open a museum of wax anatomies in Paris in 1711 (Talairach-Vielmas, ‘Anatomical Models’), and also exhibited in London, in 1719. Much of the correspondence here, principally with his colleague Domenico Guglielmini (1655-1710) at Padova, concerns Desnoues’ embalming practices, and includes a lengthy description (pp.31-48) of his method of preserving one particular subject for teaching anatomy, that of a young woman who died in childbirth, and her child. He describes every step from selecting his subjects at the local hospital morgue, to cleaning and preparation (with a reference to ‘Mr Boyle’s hydraulic pump’ (p.35)), the preparation and exact condition of wax (not too hard, soft, hot or cold), and so on. He also describes how to make and use varnish, from ground beetle (p.44). This particular case, he writes, was well known - the lecture itself was two and a half hours long, but attended, he estimated, by around 2000 people. His

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