Daniel Tauvry - Nouvelle anatomie raisonnée - 1693

TAUVRY, DANIEL. — A NEW RATIONAL ANATOMY (PARIS, ESTIENNE MICHALET, 1693. 2ND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED).
Paris: Estienne Michallet, 1693.
In-12. Full brown calfskin binding of the period, spine with raised bands ornamented.
Second edition, revised and considerably enlarged by the author, published in Tauvry’s lifetime under the Estienne Michallet imprint, the king’s printer.

A brilliant pupil who was made doctor at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris at only 18, Daniel Tauvry was one of the most ardent defenders of mechanical medicine. In this fundamental work, he strives to explain the functioning of the organs, the circulation of blood, chylification, and glandular secretions by purely physical and geometric principles, away from the theories of medieval medical alchemy.

The work offers superb iconography of comparative anatomy, detailing with precision the vascularization and the visceral structures in humans and some animals (Sténon’s canal, Wirsung’s duct, Aselli’s lacteals).

Exemplar preserved in its seventeenth‑century full brown calf binding. Spine with readable raised bands and period gilding retained within the compartments, wear from use and marked losses at the heads, tails, edges and along the jointed edges (cracking and slight leather losses at the head and tail of the spine). Binding remains sturdy. Interior in good condition on laid paper with a faint damp stain in the lower margin on a few leaves.

Well complete with the beautiful engraved frontispiece and the sequence of anatomical plates well printed. Period manuscript ownership marks dated 1703.

Published at the end of the seventeenth century, this treatise illustrates the great scientific shift of the era: the human body ceases to be seen as a receptacle of mysterious humors and becomes a precision clockwork governed by the laws of Newtonian and Cartesian physics.