Anatomy. VESALIUS. Opera Omnia Anatomica & Chirurgica cura Hermanni Boerhaave.

2 folio volumes, 458 x 280 mm. Contemporary vellum binding over wooden boards, with blindtooled ornamentation, spines in 9 sections with gilt title on red morocco label. 42 unnumbered pages, including Half-page, engraved Frontispiece, Title-page and subscribers' leaf, 572, Portrait of Vesalius and 67 numbered plates outside the text; 8 unnumbered pages, 577-682, [2, Half-page with Falloppio's Half-title], 683-1156, [52 ‘Index’], Plates outside the text numbered 68-76, 76a, 76a, 76b, 76c, 77-79. Two Titlepages in red and black with engraved vignette, Initials and woodcut decorations, various woodcut illustrations in the text. Handwritten inscription on the half-title with dedication “Souvenir amical”. The repeated plate 76a contains the engravings that had to be cut to compose the movable parts to be applied in some plates. In total Frontispiece engraved by Jan Wandelaar, Portrait of Vesalius, 83 Plates outside the text, all engraved in copper. Some traces of wear, stains on pages 935-938, in overall good condition, copy with wide margins.

A refined and important edition of the complete works of Vesalius, edited by Hermann Boerhaave and Bernhard Siegfried Albinus. The first volume opens with the biography of Vesalius, followed by the reprint of the 1555 edition of the Fabrica; the second volume contains the 1543 Epitome, with the famous full-page illustrations, the epistle on China, the Chirurgia magna, the Examen on Falloppio’s research, with the addition of a letter from Falloppio himself to Pietro Manna and Cuneus’ Examen on Galen’s anatomy. The editors have added explanations to the anatomical nomenclature, updated for 18th-century readers. The work is illustrated with a magnificent frontispiece depicting the dissection performed by Vesalius in the Anatomical Theatre of Padua, with the portrait of the famous anatomist taken from the painting by Titian and with 83 large plates engraved on copper by Jan Wandelaar, the illustrator of the Atlas of Anatomy by Albinus, which reproduce the woodcuts of the 16th century editions. Choulant: “The first edition of all the works of Vesalius”. Norman Library: “The only collected edition of Vesalius' works, issued by Boerhaave (...) and Albinus (...), with copperplate reproductions of the Vesalian woodblocks by Jan Wandelaar (...). The editors added explanations of Vesalius's sixteenth-century anatomical nomenclature for their eighteenth-century readers, and prefaced the first volume with a biography of Vesalius, which Lindeboom has tentatively attributed to Boerhaave (...).” 

Blake p. 473; Cushing VI.D 8; Lindeboom, Bibliographia Boerhaaviana, 554; Norman 2143; Waller 9917; Choulant, p. 183.