W. P. Watson Antiquarian Books

EUSTACHI, Bartolomeo Libellus de dentibus. Venice, [Vicenzo Luchino], 1563

4to (190 x 135 mm), pp [viii] 95 [1], with printer's device on title and colophon leaf; a fine, crisp copy in early eighteenth-century calf, upper joint cracked but sound. £11,500

First edition of one of the great books in dental history. 'Basing his work on the dissection of foetuses and newborn children, Eustachi was the first to study the teeth in any considerable detail. He provided an important description of the first and second dentitions and described the hard outer tissue and soft inner structure of the teeth. He also attempted an explanation of the problem of the sensitivity of the tooth's hard structure' (Garrison and Morton).
Bartolomeo Eustachi (ca 1505-1574) was one of the most outstanding anatomical researchers in the sixteenth century, and was described as a second Vesalius. Unfortunately, much of his discoveries were embodied in a series of anatomical plates that were not published until their rediscovery in the eighteenth century. 'Had the Eustachian anatomical illustrations not been lost to the medical world for over a century, it seems likely that anatomical studies would have reached maturity in the seventeenth rather than the eighteenth century' (DSB).
The Libellus was published as part of Eustachi's Opuscula anatomica, 1564, but with its own title-page dated 1563 and with its own pagination and signatures. Although it is occasionally found on its own, there is no hard evidence that it was issued separately. In any case, it is exceptionally rare, as is the Opuscula.

Provenance: contemporary marginalia; Nicolas Foucault, Jesuit College of Paris, with symbols on spine

Garrison and Morton 3668; Reynolds 4758; Waller 10615; (for the Opuscula) Durling 1408; Norman 739; Grolier Medicine 21; Wellcome 2091

£11500

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