pdf - Roger Gaskell Rare Books

The College of Physicians had registered both Latin and English editions of
De rachitide on 14 June 1650; in February the next year Peter Cole registered
an English version, at the same time entering Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives
and The English Physitian as well as English translations of Fernel’s works and a
treatise on fevers by ‘Phil Armin.’, the pretended translator of the Glisson. The
College’s favoured publisher, Philip Dugard complained to the Council of
State on 5 March. The outcome is unclear, though Cole was ordered before the
committee of Examinations on 16 April 1651. (Jonathan Sanderson, Nicholas
Culpeper and the Book Trade, PhD thesis, Leeds, 1999, pp. 88–89).
68
GLISSON, Francis (1597–1677)
Tractatus de natura substantiae energetica, seu de vita naturae,
eiusque tribus primis facultatibus, I. Perceptiva, II. Appetitiva, & III.
Motiva, [brace] naturalibus, &c.
London: typis E. Flesher. Prostat venalis apud H. Brome sub signo
Bombardae in Coemeterio Paulino, & N. Hooke ad insignia Regia in vico
Little Britain, 1672.
4to: A4 (+/– A1) a–f4 (–f4 presumed blank) B–3Y4 , 295 of 296 leaves,
pp. [54] 534 [2] (errata on last leaf, verso blank). A1, engraved portrait
signed ‘W. Faithorne del. et fecit’ showing Glisson aged 75, printed
on thicker paper and possibly supplied from another copy or another
work.
2 engraved plates of diagrams (bound at the end).
198 x 150mm. Some browning, worm tracks in blank corners in sigs
3G–3L.
Binding: Contemporary vellum boards.
Provenance: Shelf mark XVIII.6 on pastedown; old oval library stamp
on a2 (illegible).
First edition. Advertised in the Michaelmas Term Catalogue (October–
December) at 8s, bound (TC I, p. 120.) Wing G858; ESTC R37387;
Wellcome III, p. 126; Krivatsy 4827; Waller 10809.
‘Glisson maintained that the Wrst draft of the Tractatus de ventriculo et intestinis
was written around 1662 but was set aside in favor of the Tractatus de natura
substantiae energetica (1672), dedicated to Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord
Shaftesbury, whose family Glisson had long served as physician. The work
attempts to prove there is life in all bodies. In so­called inanimate bodies it
is speciWed by their forms, whereas in plants and animals life is modiWed to
become the vegetative soul and the sensitive soul, respectively. In animals the
implanted life (vita insita) is duplicated and triplicated by the inXux of blood
(vita inXuens) and by the psychic regulations.’ (Owsei Temkin, 5:426b.)
The engraved portrait in this copy is the engraving by Faithorne after
his painting now at the Royal College of Physicians (Chaplin, Descripitive
catalogue of the Portraits... in the Royal College of Physicians, 1926, p. 20). The
engraving must surely have been made for this book (and catalogued as such
by Renate Burgess, Portraits of Doctors & Scientists in the Wellcome Institute