Recent Acquisitions

ANATOMY. Nathaniel Highmore’s Corporis humani disquisitio anatomica (The Hague, 1651) is one of the most attractive anatomical works of the seventeenth century. Its 18 copperplate anatomical illustrations are excellent, and Highmore’s descriptions of the maxillary sinuses and other anatomical features were the most definitive to that date. Gift of John Martin, M.D.

BOOK ILLUSTRATION. The Truthful Lens (1980) by Lucien Goldschmidt and Weston J. Naef is a reference work describing books, chiefly of the nineteenth century, illustrated with original photographs. It is based on an exhibition held at the Grolier Club in 1974. Our copy of this pioneering work, one of 1,000 copies, has been presented by the Staff Association of The University of Iowa Libraries in memory of Anne Evans.

FICKE, ARTHUR DAVISON. A copy of Ficke’s Sonnets of a Portrait-Painter (1914) added to our Iowa Authors Collection contains an 18-line holographic essay on the front flyleaf concerning the expressiveness of the Shakespearean sonnet form, together with a 3-line note explaining why the author preferred this title over his other books. This is the author’s presentation copy to the Poetry Journal, dated March 1915.

FLATLAND. The eighteenth American edition of Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland was printed in San Francisco in 1980 by the Arion Press in an edition of 275 vendible copies. The hand-colored illustrations for this fantasy in two dimensions are by Andrew Hoyem, and the aluminum binding on this unusual screen-fold format is by Q-Rolo Sheet Metal Products.

FLOYER, SIR JOHN. The Physicians Pulse-Watch (London, 1707, 1710), here complete with the rare second volume, is an English work which draws extensively upon Chinese pulse lore. Floyer was the first European to measure the pulse with the aid of a watch: he believed that the exact timing of the pulse in relation to age, sex, and health could be recorded and used as a diagnostic guide. The further development of Floyer’s ideas, however, had to wait for nearly two more centuries. Gift of John Martin, M.D.

FORSTER, E. M. In 1978 the Scolar Press published, in 350 copies, a facsimile edition of a manuscript Commonplace Book kept by the English author E. M. Forster between the years 1925 and 1968. This book had actually been commenced by John Jebb, later Bishop of Limerick, in 1804; continuing this work begun by a friend of his grandfather seemingly appealed to Forster’s sense of continuity with the past. Ours is copy number 168.

HUNT, LEIGH. A remarkable association copy of the six-volume Bibliothèque Orientale by Barthelemy d’Herbelot (1781-83) has been added to our Brewer-Leigh Hunt Collection. This encyclopedic French work on Eastern lore is a source of Hunt’s most famous poem, “Abou ben Adhem,” and this is Hunt’s own copy of the book with his marginal annotations on hundreds of its pages. In a letter from James T. Fields which accompanies the set, Fields remarks of this item that “I think it the most valuable book in Hunt’s Library. I should prefer it, as an admirer of LH, to any work in the collection.” Gift of the Friends of the Library.

LEFFINGWELL, WILLIAM BRUCE. Two late nineteenth-century books added to our Iowa Authors Collection are The Art of Wing Shooting (Chicago, 1895) and Manulito; or, A Strange Friendship (Philadelphia, 1892), both by W. B. Leffingwell, who grew up near Clinton, Iowa, and later attended The University of Iowa. The novel Manulito, which is a fictional account of the Iowa frontier, based to some extent on the activities of Leffingwell’s own father, comes to us as a gift from Professor William M. Furnish.

LEPIDOPTERA. Two publications relating to the work of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) join our rare materials concerned with natural history. The Wondrous Transformation of Caterpillars is a facsimile of 50 engravings selected from Erucarum Ortus (1718), with an introduction by William T. Steam. It was published by the Scolar Press in 1978 in an edition of 500 copies. In Schmetterlinge, Käfer und andere Insekten (Leipzig, 1976) are reproduced 120 watercolor and gouache paintings from a manuscript by Maria Merian preserved in the Library of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. In addition to a portfolio of plates, this edition has a textual volume which transcribes Merian’s notes in German and provides editorial texts in English, French, German, and Russian.

MERCURIALE, GIROLAMO. Mercuriale’s De morbis cutaneis (Venice, 1571-72) is an early treatise on diseases of the skin. This is a first edition by an investigator who was among the first to experiment with skin flaps in cosmetic surgery. Gift of John Martin, M.D.

MONTAIGNE. The Journal du voyage de Michel de Montaigne en Italie, par la Suisse & l’Allemagne, en 1580 & 1581 was first published in 1774 from a manuscript which had for long been lost. The introduction by M. de Querlon tells how it was rediscovered and finally published. Our large-paper copy of the folio edition, which presents the original Italian text and its French translation on facing pages, is a purchase from the Sara and Harold Lincoln Thompson Fund for Travel Literature and Ethnic Arts.

OPHTHALMOLOGY. Georg Bartisch’s Ophthalmolodouleia (Dresden, 1583) is one of the earliest works to deal specifically and extensively with the subject of ophthalmology. A general practitioner who described himself on the title page as “citizen, oculist, surgeon, and wound dresser,” Bartisch wrote his treatise, not in Latin, but in the vernacular German. This rare book has many full-page woodcut illustrations showing the anatomy and pathology of the eye, operative procedures, and ophthalmological instruments. Gift of John Martin, M.D.

STEFANSSON, VILHJALMUR. A Chronological Bibliography of the Published Works of Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962) by Robert W. Mattila, with an introductory essay by Evelyn Stefansson Nef, is one of 75 copies of a work printed at the Stinehour Press in 1978 for the Stefansson Collection at the Dartmouth College Libraries. Stefansson, the well-known Arctic explorer, was a graduate of The University of Iowa, class of 1903.

SURGICAL APPLIANCES. Benjamin Gooch was a prolific inventor of surgical apparatus. He is remembered eponymically by the term “Gooch’s splint,” a splint for fractures which was in use until the appearance of plaster casts. Our first edition of his Cases and Practical Remarks in Surgery (London, 1758) is a presentation copy to the dedicatee, William Fellowes. Along with his Medical and Chirurgical Observations (London, 1773), it joins our collection of books in the history of medicine as a gift from John Martin, M.D.

SURGICAL PATHOLOGY. Marco Aurelio Severino’s De recondita abscessum natura, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt, 1643) was one of the first texts to illustrate case histories with actual drawings of the patient or the lesion. In this pioneer study Severino, perhaps for the first time, differentiates between benign and malignant neoplasms. Gift of John Martin, M. D.