pdf - Roger Gaskell Rare Books

and charter members of the Royal Society.’ (Gordon W. O’Brien, DSB
11:121b).
156
PRIMROSE (or PRIMEROSE), James (1600–1659)
Animadversiones in Johannis Wallaei, Medicinae apud Leydenses
professoris, disputationem medicam, quam pro circulatione sanguinis
Harveanâ proposuit: cui addita est, eiusdem de usu lienis adversus
medicos recentiores sententia.
Amsterdam: apud Joannem Janssonium, 1640.
4to: A–G4 , 28 leaves, pp. 56. Printer’s device on titlepage.
200 x 145mm, untrimmed. upper margin of title leaf frayed; light
foxing.
Binding: Recent quarter calf. ‘29’ in MS in the bottom corner of the
titlepage, indicating its former position in a tract volume.
Provenance: Old library stamp of Rostock universitiy on title and last
page.
First edition. Reprinted in Recentiorum disceptationes de motu cordis
(Leiden, 1647). Keynes p. 119 (with incorrect bibliographical
information, see below).
The Scottish physician James Primrose, was the Wrst of Harvey’s critics
to appear in print. Keynes says of him that ‘He was not only congenitally
unable to accept new ideas, but had a compulsive urge to combat them in
print’ (Keynes, Life of William Harvey, 1978, p. 320). His Exercitationes et
animadversiones in librum G. Harveii de motu cordis et circulatione sanguinis,
had appeared in London in 1630. Here he returns to the fray with an attack
on Harvey’s supporter, the Leyden professor Johannes Walaeus (1604–1649),
or rather the thesis of Roger Drake for which Walaeus had acted as praeses,
read in 1639 and published in 1640. Primrose published three more attacks
on Harveian supporters, two against Johannes Regius of utrecht in 1640; and
one against Vopiscus Plemp of Louvain in 1657.
This separately printed pamphlet is rare and not found in the standard
medical library catalogues. Keynes, in the Appendix to his bibliography of
Harvey, is in error in citing it as having been published at Leiden in 1639
(Appendix, p. 119). No such edition exists. The error seems to have arisen
(and is not corrected in the third edition of the bibliography, 1989) because
the 1639 Leiden edition of De motu cordis (Keynes 3) published by Johannis
Maire is sometimes bound with the Primrose and other pamphlets. But these
additonal pamphlets were printed in 1640 (as Keynes correctly states, but
he mistakenly attributes them all to Maire). It was perhaps Maire who put
together the composite volumes for sale in 1640 as he reprinted the additional
pamphlets, including the Primrose, to go with his re­issue of the 1639 edition
of De motu cordis, now under the title Recentiorum disceptationes de motu cordis,
published in 1647 (Keynes 6).
Although the present copy, which is untrimmed, has evidently been
extracted from a bound collection of pamphlets, it was presumably not bound