About this Item
Edinburgh: William Creech, 1792.
Octavo (8 7/8" x 5 1/2", 225mm x 140mm): [full collation available upon request]. 58 leaves, pp. [2] (2pp. blank) i-iii iv-v [1] (blank) 1 2-107 [1] (blank). With 40 engraved plates.
Bound in publisher's blue drab boards, rebacked in paper. On the spine, title, author, and date printed in black ink. Text leaves and engraved plates untrimmed.
Cracking and chipping to the extremities. Corners bumped. Soiling and spotting throughout. Endpapers mounted to stubs. Yellowed dampstain the the lower margin of the plates, not affecting the impression. Contemporary tape repair to the margin of plate XXXVII and the rear endpaper.
Nations have long been conceptualized through the lens of the body, but in the XVIIIc, birth in particular became a site for political and cultural debate, linking reproduction to national strength and identity. With this association came the reasoning that birth should thus be supervised by the rational, self-regulating man and the triumph of the "male-midwife" and medicalization of childbirth ensued. One such was William Smellie, an obstetrician and anatomist born in Lanark, Scotland, in 1697. Smellie practiced medicine from the age of 23 and began his career without a medical degree. After years of studying under his peers in London and Paris, Smellie taught lectures of his own and went on to receive his doctorate from the University of Glasgow in 1745.
His most prolific text, A set of anatomical tables, was originally published 9 later and was immediately met with controversy. The qualm was not that Smellie had altered the common practice of disseminating obstetrics knowledge (Smellie himself writes in his preface, "I have done something towards reducing that Art into a more simple and mechanical method") but rather that the legitimate supply of recently dead, yet heavily pregnant women was arguably inadequate to meet the needs of the publication. It was speculated that Smellie and his well-known pupil (and obstetrician of Queen Charlotte), William Hunter, may have either commissioned murders or turned a blind eye to the sources of their cadavers. The rumors became so vicious that in 1755 and fearing execution, Smellie ceased his work for several years in an effort to quash the suspicion. Bibliographers and biographers alike have since argued that several of Smellie's plates were based on the same dissections, and more still bear striking resemblance to the work of other anatomists, reducing the charge from murder to plagiarism -- a crime many publishers can live with.
The copper plates for the tome were meticulously engraved by Charles Grignion after drawings executed in red chalk by Jan van Rymsdyk. The illustrations were van Rymsdyk's first foray into medical illustration (a low art form at the time) and the work was intended to be a visual companion to Smellie's Treatise of the Theory and Practice of Midwifery. The technical skill was critiqued for lacking artistry and being too engrossed with copying detail (perhaps the same could be said for Smellie's project), which van Rymsdyk rebuked by attesting that "the third [method for imitating an object] is where the different substances and every minute part is discovered by being brought so near the eye. This distance I was obliged to make use of, for to represent nature in its greatest beauty" (Museum Britannicum). Despite Britain's coterie, the present ork proved invaluable to the rising class of male midwives and a second edition appeared in 1761. Revised iterations continued well into the XIXc and American editions boasted "an entire new set of plates," at which point the integrity of the original publication was somewhat lost. Even with its popularity, A set of anatomical tables evades collectors. Indeed, OCLC records no duplicate of this 1792 Edinburgh edition.
Grolier/Medicine 43B (not this edition); Garrison Morton 6154.1 (not this edition); not in ESTC; not in BHL.
Cataloged by G.R. Murdock.
Seller Inventory # GRM0075
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