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Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de.MareMagnum

Suite des Eloges des Academiciens de l'Academie Royale des Sciences, morts depuis l'An MDCCXXII. Paris, Marc Bordelet, 1733.

17338vo. (8), 322 [but: 422] pp., (2 pp. publisher's catalogue). Bound in attractive and very well-preserved full contemporary calf with spine in six compartments, red and gilt title label, gilt florets. Scarce early separate edition of Fontenelle's eulogies, and the first biography of Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli to appear publicly outside of the Histoire de l'Académie des Sciences. The work introduces the public to 14 members of the Académie des Sciences deceased between 1725 and 1730, including Czar Peter, Isaac Newton, and Nicolas Hartsoeker. The present edition, however, contains 7 new eulogies which had only appeared previously in the annual journal of the Académie des Sciences: Camille d'Hostun de la Baume, duc de Tallard (Marshal of France); Père Sébastien Truchet, active in mathematics, hydraulics, graphics, and typography; Francesco Bianchini, who worked on calendar reform for three successive popes; Giacomo Filippo Maraldi, astronomer and mathematician; Jean-Baptiste-Henri de Valincour, official historiographer to Louis XIV; Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Ottoman traveller and Hapsburg cartographer; and Guichard Joseph Duverney, anatomist and author of one of the earliest comprehensive works on otology. - As one of the earliest examples of a popular publication of Fontenelle's eulogies (preceded only by a 1731 Hague printing), the work is an important symbol of what today is seen as Fontenelle's primary accomplishment: while history has smiled on men such as Marsigli and du Verney, it is often forgotten that it was due to works like Fontenelle's, which heavily publicised their achievements to a popular audience, that they are remembered and acknowledged today. "It was Bernard Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757) who by his eulogies of scientists first bridged the gap between the scientific communities and the world at large [...] the éloges of the old Academy of Sciences acquainted laymen with a discipline that was at once esoteric by its novelty and forbidding by its terminology and methodology. Hence the éloges, aside from the other functions they performed in the service of science, also served as a public relations organ in the same manner as journals, textbooks, public lectures, literary dialogues, scientific expositions, and cabinets de physique and d'histoire naturelle" (Paul, Science and immortality: the éloges of the Paris Academy of Sciences, pp. 1-2). - One corner and lower edge of cover slightly rubbed, otherwise a lovely copy, pages clean and fresh. Cf. Charles B. Paul, Science and immortality: the éloges of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1980). For a bibliographical review of Fontenelle's éloges see Suzanne Delorme, "Contribution à la bibliographie de Fontenelle", pp. 303-307, Revue d'histoire des sciences et de leurs applications, Tome 10 n°4, pp. 300-309 (1957).

Inlibris · Austria€350.00

Gutermann, Georg Friedrich (auct.) / Zeller, Johannes (praes.).MareMagnum

Dissertatio inauguralis medica de mammis & lacte, in qua status tam naturalis, quam praeternaturalis, hujusque therapia rationalis [...]. Tübingen, Josef Sigmund, 1727.

4to. 43, (1) pp. Papered spine. Edges sprinkled in red. Very rare dissertation on the female breast and human lactation, written by Georg Friedrich Gutermann (1705-84), later a highly regarded obstetrician and in 1741 ennobled as "Gutermann Edler von Gutershofen". The author describes the healthy human breast, its locale, number, size, and shape, the areola and nipple, characterizes it as a gland, and gives an account of the nerves, milk ducts, and blood vessels. While their principal purpose, writes Gutermann, is that of producing milk for nourishment, he notes that the breasts are also regarded as things of beauty and enumerates those features of the female bust which are considered the most graceful (p. 13). The second section of the dissertation is devoted to pathology: ailments of the nipples, problems with lactation, inflammatory breast cancer, etc. The third and final section gives an account of various possible treatments. - Born in Biberach an der Riss in Swabia, Gutermann later worked in Kaufbeuren and Augsburg. Here he was a fierce adversary of the local obstetrician Johann Andreas Diesch, whose sad record of disastrously failed childbirths (brought about by a stubborn insistence that sharp instruments were necessary) had earned Diesch notoriety as the "butcher of women and children" (cf. Hirsch II, 705). Perhaps most remarkably, Gutermann was the father of the famous writer and salonnière Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807), sometime fiancée of C. M. Wieland. Gutermann saw to it that the young girl enjoyed a strict but encompassing Pietist education: she learned to read and write early and was instructed in languages, art, literature, music, and housewifery (though in spite of her pleas she was denied instruction in Latin). - Some browning and occasional waterstaining throughout, more pronounced in title and final leaf. Only two copies in the U.S. (National Library of Medicine; Cornell University). OCLC 311673497. Not in Hirsch, Blake, Wellcome or Waller.

Inlibris · Austria€350.00

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