Lorenzo Bellini - ANATOMY Opera Omnia - 1708

The anatomist of the kidney’s “tubes”: Bellini’s Opera omnia first edition

MOUSEION CURATOR NOTE:

Few seventeenth-century anatomists changed the kidney’s idea as decisively as Bellini. In his hands it becomes neither emblem nor mystery, but a legible instrument: a terrain of conduits whose geometry explains function. That shift—from the kidney as “flesh” to the kidney as architecture—is one of the quiet revolutions of early modern medicine, and this 1708 collected edition is its most coherent single-stage witness.

THE VOLUME:

BELLINI, Lorenzo (1643–1704). Opera Omnia. Cum praefatione Joannis Bohnii.
Venice, apud Michaelem Hertz, 1708. 2 parts in 1 volume. 4to.
[12] leaves, 504 pages; [4] leaves, 285 pages; [1] leaf.
Repeated woodcut title vignette; 5 copper-engraved plates.
Binding: contemporary flexible parchment (limp vellum), slightly stained, with a beautiful calligraphic spine title.
Bibliography: Blake, p. 40; Wellcome II, p. 140; DSB I, 592 ff.; cf. Bleker, Geschichte der Nierenkrankheiten, p. 53 ff.

VOLUME DESCRIPTION:

First complete edition of Lorenzo Bellini’s medical writings. Bellini—formed at Pisa under the formidable circle of Marcello Malpighi’s generation (including Redi and Borelli, per standard accounts)—belongs to that Tuscan tradition in which anatomy, mechanism, and experiment begin to cohere into a modern physiological imagination.

Among the principal texts gathered here is Bellini’s youthful landmark on the kidney, the Exercitatio anatomica de structura et usu renum (first published 1662), hailed in the canonical medical bibliography as a “classical description of the gross anatomy of the kidney.” Bellini’s decisive move was to insist that the organ is not chiefly a solid mass, but rather an immense aggregation of tubules and channels—a conception later anatomists would literally name into permanence as the ducts/tubules of Bellini, the collecting tubules of the kidney.

Also present is the urological and clinical synthesis first issued in 1683 (De urinis et pulsibus…), for which Garrison & Morton preserves a succinct verdict: “Bellini realized the value of the urine as an aid to diagnosis and insisted on its chemical analysis in pathological conditions.” This volume does not merely preserve Bellini’s anatomical seeing; it records an early insistence that bodily fluids can be interrogated analytically—an attitude that anticipates later clinical chemistry.

CONDITION REPORT

Mostly foxed and browned.
Binding slightly stained.
Front joint failed: upper cover detached, hanging by the sewing supports (cords/strings) only; inner hinge split with tear/loss at head and exposed sewing.

Overall a sound, appealing working copy in attractive contemporary limp vellum with a notably fine calligraphic spine title.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

This 1708 Venetian Hertz printing is regularly described in the trade as “2 volumes in one” (two parts issued together), with the diagnostic point for collectors being the presence of the 5 engraved plates and the repeated woodcut vignette on the titles.