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SPIEGEL, Adriaan van de [SPIGELIUS, Adrianus].

De formato foetu liber singularis aeneis figuris exornatus epistolae duae anatomicae. Tractatus de arthritide opera posthumastudio. .

Padua: Martini et Pasquati, 1626.

1st Edition. Hardcover. Folio - over 12 - 15" tall. Good. Item #002293

Folio (410 x 260 mm). [8], 104 pp., including 9 full-page engraved illustrations by Giulio Casserio, drawn and engraved by Odoardo Fialetti and Francesco Valesio, woodcut device on title-page. Signatures: a-b2 A-2C2, lacking text leaf Bb2 (added in good facsimile). Recent half vellum. Text little browned and soiled in margins, frequent ink smudges (with some pager damage caused by ink corrosion), brown spotting, some edge fraying and a few worm holes in blank margins to the end, final leaf with chipped margins backed by paper. ----

THE RARE FIRST EDITION. Eimas, Heirs of Hippocrates 413; NLM/Krivatsy 11295; Wellcome I, 6038; Choulant, pp. 223-228. His work on the development of the human fetus, De Formatu Foetu, was left in unillustrated manuscript on Spiegel's death. It was edited by his son-in-law, another physician named Liberalis Crema, who illustrated the 1626 edition with 9 copperplates purchased from Casserio's grandson. These plates were drawn by the late-Mannerist Italian painter and printmaker, Odoardo Fialetti (1573-1638) and engraved by Francesco Valesio (see also #3, Casserio). They depict the pregnant uterus, placenta and fetus and are among Fialetti's most beautiful anatomical engravings. "Four of them represent entire female figures with the abdomen cut open." (Eimas, Heirs of Hippocrates).
"The work was published at Crema's expense and is rare." (Choulant, p.226).
After the death of Giulio Casseri, Adriaan van de Spiegel (or Adrianus Spigelius) from Brussels (1578-1625) was appointed professor at the University of Padua in 1616, where he took over the chair of anatomy from Casseri. "The ordinary lecture of anatomy and surgery was given to [him, but] Fabricius maintained the supraordinary role. Spigelius was also appointed a Knight of St. Mark in 1623, and died in Padua in 1625. In De semitertiana libri quatuor (1624), Spigelius gave the first detailed description of malaria. [...] Spigelius described the caudate lobe of the liver (Spigelius' lobe) and was also the first to describe the lateral ventral hernia (Spigelian hernia) through the linea semilunaris (Spigelius' line), a curved tendinous line along the lateral border of the rectus muscle. Spigelius was also a botanist, and the genus Spigelia derives its name from him. (A. Porzionato et al., The Anatomical School of Padua. The Anatomical Record, Vol. 295, no. 6, 2012, p.908).

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