Leonardo FIORAVANTI - Il tesoro della vita humana. Diviso in libri quattro - 1629

Leonardo FIORAVANTI.

The Treasure of Human Life. Divided into four books.

1629, by Spineda, In Venice,
1 volume in-8 bound from [16]-327 ff,
Full vellum binding of the period, manuscript title in long gothic letters.
Ex-libris of Jean Rouché.

Very rare work by the Bologna-born surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti (1517-1588),
first published in 1570. The author gathers a very large number of observations on diseases and infirmities, most in the form of letters to colleagues or patients; but the work is best known for being one of the first to treat plastic surgery and, more precisely, rhinoplasty, with the description of the "Italian graft". It is doubtless his reading that inspired Gaspare Tagliacozzi with his own work and the writing of the famous De Chirurgia Curtorum per Insitionem (1597). Fioravanti counts among the most unusual figures in medicine of his time. He left his native city at the age of 31 to lead a life of a traveler: in Naples he was recruited as a surgeon aboard the Spanish fleet bound for the North African coast. During this expedition, which he recounts in the Treasure of the Life Humana, he witnesses an altercation between two soldiers, one of whom, a certain Andres Gutierrez, ends up with a piece of his nose cut off; Fioravanti reports having picked up the severed part from the sand, urinated on it to clean it, and sewn it back on. The success of the operation could be attested, according to the author, by the testimony of the injured man, who was still alive at the time of writing the book. On returning from Africa, Fioravanti went to Calabria to meet two surgeons who practiced the famous Italian “secret method” of reconstructing the nose, the brothers Pietro and Paolo Vineo (or Vianeos), who themselves had implemented it according to a description given in the preceding century by Antonio Branca: at the invitation of the surgeons, the author witnessed five operations that he followed from start to finish, from the incision made in the arm, the suture between the flesh flap and the nose, the immobilization until the skin “grows into the nose” (vascularization of the graft) and the placing of a metal piece to shape the nose in good proportions (chapter 27, pp. 47-48). Fioravanti then went to Rome and Venice, where he had many works published, all of which would go through several editions in the 16th and 17th centuries and would be translated into several languages. In 1568, he returned to Bologna, where he was received as a doctor within the famous Collegio de’ Dottori. Ex-libris of Jean Rouché. Krivatsy 4098. Wellcome I, no. 2306. Mazzola & Santoni-Rugiu,