Milestones of Science Books

SWAMMERDAM, Jan.

Tractatus Physico-Anatomico-Medicus de Respiratione usuque Pulmonum . . . editio altera, cui subjuncta est D. Alberti Haller . . . de diaphragmatis musculis dissertatio anatomica. Editio tertia.

Leiden: Conrad Wishoff, 1738.

2nd Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. Item #003585

4to (236 x 178 mm). [16], 95 [1] pp., including engraved additional title, folding engraved plate, 7 woodcut text illustrations, woodcut initials, head- and tailpieces. All pages uncut. Contemporary three-quarter vellum and speckled paper boards, gilt-lettered spine label (cover soiled, extremities rubbed). Minor browning, some scattered spotting, pale brown-staining at lower gutter throughout. Provenance: Johannis-Baptistae Marduel (bookplate to front pastedown). ----

Garrison-Morton 1724, NLM/Blake, p.440. SECOND EDITION of Swammerdam's medical thesis, reprinted with the third edition of Haller's anatomical study of the diaphragm. Swammerdam "recorded his discovery that the lungs of newborn infants will float on water if respiration has taken place, an important medico-legal point" (Garrison-Morton). "Swammerdam's medical thesis offer[ing] a perfectly Cartesian explanation of the motion of the lungs and the function of breathing, supplemented by the iatrochemistry of Sylvius. Swammerdam struggled to avoid using any attractive powers, whether of the mouth, of the lungs themselves, or of a partial vacuum, to explain the rushing of air into the lungs . . . Swammerdam argued that the muscular expansion of the chest outward pushes the ambient air down into the lungs" (DSB XIII, p.169). Swammerdam's theory, evolved in ignorance of Boyle's idea that the air has a springiness, was easily destroyed in the following year by John Mayow in his Tractatus duo (Oxford, 1668). - Visit our website to see more images!

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