SANTORIO, Santorio Ars... de statica medicina et de responsione ad staticomasticem. Aphorismorum sectionibus septem comprehensa. Venice, Marc'antonio Brogiollo, 1634
12mo (125 x 66 mm), ff [11] 71; a fine copy in eighteenth-century calf, gilt rules on sides, slight wear to head and tail of spine. £1750
Third edition (first 1614, virtually unobtainable) of this medical classic, the work that 'introduced quantitative experimentation into biological science' (DSB). Written in the form of aphorisms, Santorio presents his research into metabolism, then known as 'insensible perspiration'. He devised an elaborate weighing chair, and experimented on himself to determine the quantitative changes in the body, only eating and drinking while seated in his chair. Through a long series of experiments and careful record-keeping established that a large part of excretion occurs invisibly through the skin. He employed a pulse-clock, and was the first to use a thermometer in physiological experiments; he was also the 'inventor' of the thermometer insofar as he was the first to attach a fixed scale to Galileo's thermoscope, thus making it a quantitative measuring instrument.
'Through most of the 17th and 18th centuries Santorio's name was linked with that of Harvey as the greatest figure in physiology and experimental medicine because of his introduction of precision instruments for quantitative studies. He was also the founder of modern metabolic research' (Garrison and Morton n. 572.1).
This is the earliest edition listed by Waller, and the second earliest in Krivatsy. There is only one copy of the first edition listed in NUC (Yale) and only one of the second edition (NLM).
Provenance: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), founder of scientific anthropology (see DSB II pp 203-4) with his signature on booklabel on front pastedown; n. 452 in Jeremy Norman Medicine, travel & anthropology from the library of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (Catalogue six, 1979)
Krivatsy 10236; Waller 8477; Wellcome 5760; see Garrison and Morton 573, Grolier Medicine 25, Norman 1890 for the first; NUC: DNLM only; OCLC adds UCLA
£1750
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