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The Viscera of The Human Body; Including the Organs of Digestion, Respiration, Secretion, and Excretion; in a Series of Plates, with References and Physiological Comments. Edited by Jones Quain, M.D. and W. J. Erasmus Wilson. London: Printed for Taylor and Walton, Booksellers and Publishers to University College, Upper Gower-Street. 1840. Early half brown leather binding with marbled paper over boards. Respined and corners patched at some point. Red title label and gold bands on spine. Scattered chips and scuffs. Marbled end papers. Front hinge starting to crack, and rear hinge cracked, but boards still securely attached at joints. A few plates with mild mottling and scattered rare dampstain. Predomiately clean and bright. Binding tight. Bottom of final index leaf reads end of fourth division. Ffep, blank, title, 67 numbered pages and 32 interleaved plates, blank, rfep See G-M13300, Jones Quain (1796 1865), five volumes on anatomy in folio, from which this book is a reprint of the volume on visceral anatomy: The most ambitious 19th century English anatomy illustrated by lithography. Some copies were issued with hand-colored plates. The five volumes, containing a total of 201 plates, describe the muscles, blood vessels, nerves, viscera, and bones and ligaments. Wilson designed the plates for this work, and signed some of them, but the plates were actually drawn by other artists, including J. Walsh and William Bagg, a portrait painter in London. Wilson also co-edited the second through fifth volumes. The section on the anatomy of the nerves is especially notable, with thirty-eight plates, including ten elegant colored plates of the brain and spinal cord, and a stunning colored plate showing the distribution of the eighth pair of nerves. Quain, along with Erasmus Wilson (1809-1884), originally published their anatomical drawings in five volumes (1836-1842). Regarding that set, Heirs 887 states, This elaborate series of anatomical plates and accompanying descriptions ranks with the best nineteenth-century representations. … Quain was an anatomist and teacher of some note whose Elements of descriptive and practical anatomy (1828) went through eleven editions. Wilson, who co-edited the second through the fifth volumes, was a dermatologist and philanthropist whose fame rests largely on the role he played in the demise of flogging in the British army. (Heirs 887). See also G-M 410, regarding Quain s 1828 book: Among the most important of the English textbooks on anatomy. An eleventh edition was published in 1908-29. Joseph Maclise, 1815-1880. Heirs of Hippocrates 954: "Maclise was a student of Samuel Cooper and a prominent London surgeon." See also G-M 13302: "The drawings of Maclise for Quain's Anatomy of the arteries and for his own Surgical anatomy are indeed done, as Quain wrote, with spirit and effect. These figures of anatomical dissection seem lifelike; in many plates the figure is shown as a torso, or a bust, or as a full-or half-length figure. The faces seem to be a gallery of portraits, perhaps of visitors to the 1851 Great Exhibition. They are mostly young men with fine hair-bearded, clean-shaven, or mustachioed, with or without sideburns; occasionally there are remarkably handsome black men. Many appear god-like. This is indeed 'high' art, only incidentally of an anatomical subject. If the analogy is not too far-fetched, Maclise's drawing may be compared with the work in different media of the English Romantic poets or of the composer Berlioz. The same comparisons have been made in relation to the work of the Victorian artist Daniel Maclise (1806-70), Joseph Maclise's older brother. They remained close, traveling in Italy together, and sharing houses in Bloomsbury and Chelsea" (Roberts & Tomlinson p. 564).
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