The first edition of this collection of the letters of French doctor, surgeon and pioneering anatomical wax modeller, Guillaume Desnoues (1650-1735). A surgeon in Paris, Desnoues was prosecuted for clandestine dissection and fled to Italy, first Florence and then Genoa, where he taught anatomy and surgery in the 1690s. Intended initially for teaching, as a longer-lasting alternative to cadavers, his “models circulated through Italy, France, Germany, Denmark and England at the very beginning of the eighteenth century”, and Desnoues became the first to open a museum of wax anatomies in Paris in 1711 (Talairach-Vielmas, ‘Anatomical Models’), and also exhibited in London, in 1719.
Much of the correspondence here, principally with his colleague Domenico Guglielmini (1655-1710) at Padova, concerns Desnoues’ embalming practices, and includes a lengthy description (pp.31-48) of his method of preserving one particular subject for teaching anatomy, that of a young woman who died in childbirth, and her child. He describes every step from selecting his subjects at the local hospital morgue, to cleaning and preparation (with a reference to ‘Mr Boyle’s hydraulic pump’ (p.35)), the preparation and exact condition of wax (not too hard, soft, hot or cold), and so on. He also describes how to make and use varnish, from ground beetle (p.44). This particular case, he writes, was well known - the lecture itself was two and a half hours long, but attended, he estimated, by around 2000 people.
His correspondent Guglielmini writes admiringly of ‘toutes les beautez’ of Desnoues’ wax creations, as well as referencing ‘Abbé Zumbo’; wax sculptor and artist Gaetano Giulio Zumbo (1656-1701) a one-time collaborator of Desnoues’, prior to their estrangement, apparently over the very case that Desnoues describes in his letters. Guglielmini calls Zumbo little more than a copyist of Desnoues’ works (p.12).
In the second half of the volume is a letter from a colleague in Rome regarding a so-called ‘monstrous birth’, illustrated in a fold-out plate (at p.174). Mistichelli describes a 30-year-old woman in Rome who gave birth to a healthy daughter, but also a second baby that resembled a lion, even down to the beginnings of the mane of a lion cub at its neck (p.176). ‘I am sending you a drawing, which you may have engraved, if you deem it useful’ (p.177). The letter goes on to discuss the reasons for the appearance of the child, staunchly dismissing the argument of some imaginationist philosophes that argued that the presence of a piece of furniture in the woman’s house supported on two wooden lion statues, might have impressed themselves on the woman’s mind to the extent that it shaped her child.
The topics of the other letters range widely, and include venereal disease (p.124), earthquakes (p.192), the anatomy and ailments of the ear (p.204), and a letter from Pondicherry recounting voyages in the West Indies, and local medical remedies (e.g. rubbing laudanum on a painful tooth, p.230).
Provenance: With nineteenth-century ownership label to front pastedown of ‘M. Pellet, docteur-médecin, à Miribel’, near Lyon in eastern France.
Sporadic foxing, closed tears to first and second foldouts not affecting image, foldouts grubby at outer edge.
Refs: C. Gysel, ‘Le Chirgurgien Guillaume Desnoues (1650-1735)’, Université Paris Cité. L. Talairach-Vielmas, ‘Anatomical Models: A History of Disappearance?’ Histoire, médecine et santé, 5, 2014, 9-20.
OCLC: US: NY Academy of Medicine, UCLA, Chicago, National Library of Medicine, Wayne State, UMN. UK: Cambridge, St Andrews.
