One of the finest anatomical works of the 17th century

CASSERIO, Giulio Cesare (CASSERIUS, Iulius).

Pentaestheseion, hoc est de quinque sensibus liber, organorum fabricam variis iconibus fideliter aere incisis illustratam.

Venice: Nicolas Misserino, 1609.

1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. Item #002263

Large folio (410 x 272 mm), [10], 3-346, [18] pp., including engraved title and 33 full-page engravings within page numbering. Signatures: a⁴ A-2X⁴ 2Y⁶. Errata and colophon on 2Y6r. Contemporary vellum, spine and lower edge lettered in ink (head of spine chipped, extremities a bit rubbed). Housed in a custom-made clamshell box. Internally crisp and unmarked, with minor spotting in places; some brown ink smudges to upper- and fore-edge affecting outer margins of a few leaves, light dampstain to lower corner. Provenance: Michele Raby, Torino (large armorial bookplate to front pastedown). An outstanding copy in original binding and with ample margins of one of the rarest of all important 17th century anatomical works. ----

NLM/Krivatsy 2200; Waller 1810; not in Cushing, Osler, Wellcome, or Norman. - EXTREMELY RARE FIRST EDITION of Casserius' second important contribution to the comparative anatomy not only of the ear and the vocal organs, as in his work of 1600/01, but also of the other four sense organs and especially of the EYE. This first edition of Pentaestheseion is much rarer than the Ferrara, 1601, De Vocis on the ear and voice, and in fact so rare that Choulant-Frank never saw a copy. They note: "The original edition is said to have contained a copper-title and thirty-three plates...," and proceed to describe the Frankfurt edition of 1622, with the same number of plates but "reduced and certainly executed by another artist. Some of them are even reversed and show much inferior workmanship" (p. 224). The very fine anatomical plates for which this book is noted are both drawn and engraved by the Swiss artist Joseph Maurer, a pupil of Tobias Stimmer who lived in Casserius' house. The 12 plates pertaining to the ear are the same as those of Casserius' earlier work; they constitute "the first accurate pictorial presentation of the internal ear" (Lyle M. Sellers, Annals of Otology, LXVIII, No. 3, Sept. 1959). Those dealing with the other four sense organs are new. Among them, in the especially important section dealing with the EYE and VISION (pp. 257-346) are the first pictorial representations of the conjunctival glands, later known as the Meibomian glands (cf. Garrison-Morton 1481). All the plates, according to Choulant-Frank, "are done with unusual care and are anatomically exact." Casserius' anatomy of the sense organs is of great importance in medical history, since for the first time he adds to a complete account of each human organ a full study of the same organ in various animal forms.
OCLC/WorldCat list the following copies in US libraries: McGoogan Library of Medicine, Nebraska; Bernard Becker Medical Library, St. Louis; Cornell University Library, Ithaca; Huntington Library, Art Collections & Botanical Gardens; University of Southern California, Norris Medical Library, LA.

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