Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1073

FéLIX VICQ D'AZYR (1748-1794) [Planches anatomiques]. F. A. Didot l'aîné 1786?] [2] 17 [3] [19]-68 pp., 37 plates (18 col.), each accompanied by guard sheet. 45.5 cm.

Vicq d'Azyr, the eminent French anatomist and neurologist has been called the greatest comparative anatomist of the eighteenth century. A highly successful physician, he numbered Marie Antoinette among his patients. Vicq d'Azyr's descriptions of the gross morphology of the brain were among the most accurate of his day and he identified many of the cerebral convolutions as well as various internal structures of the brain for the first time. Although Vicq d'Azyr intended his Traité d'anatomie et de physiologie (Paris, 1786-1789) to be a multi-volume set, only one volume was published. It contained all of his important neuroanatomical studies and was one of the finest works on the subject to appear before the advent of microscopy. The atlas' sixty-nine plates included thirty-four hand-colored aquatints with individual outline plates drawn and engraved by Alexandre Briceau (fl. 1765), the noted Paris engraver, from gross dissections of human brains which had been fixed in alcohol, such fixatives as formalin and other chemicals not yet being used. The atlas also included a black-and-white plate taken from Soemmerring's De basi encephali (see No. 1130). The present atlas is incomplete and contains only the first three parts of the five part atlas. The nineteen plates here present are fully described in the accompanying text, which is followed by Vicq d'Azyr's "Reflexions historiques sur les planches." Each of the eighteen colored plates is accompanied by a detailed outline plate in black and white. The additional plate is from Soemmerring and is so labeled.

See Related Record(s): 1130

Cited references: Waller 9953 (complete copy)

Gift of John Martin, M.D.