Tractatus Physico-Anatomico-Medicus, de Respiratione Usuque Pulmonum.. by SWAMMERDAM, Jan - 1667

Leiden: Danielem Abraham & Adrian à Gaasbeeck, 1667. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. 1st Edition. Hardcover. 12mo - over 6¾ - 7¾" tall. 12mo (149 x 96 mm). [16], 121, [23] pp, engraved additional title, 7 woodcuts in text of which 3 are full page. Contemporary vellum, author's name and title in manuscript on spine, some browning and mainly marginal worming and dampstaining to text, rear inner hinge broken. --- Garrison-Morton 1724; Heirs of Hippocrates 602; NLM/Krivatsy 11606; Waller 9385; Norman 2035. - FIRST EDITION of 'Swammerdam's medical thesis offer[ing] a perfectly Cartesian explanation of the motion of the lungs and the function of breathing, supplemented by the iatrochemistry of Sylvius. Swammerdam struggled to avoid using any attractive powers, whether of the mouth, of the lungs themselves, or of a partial vacuum, to explain the rushing of air into the lungs ... Swammerdam argued that the muscular expansion of the chest outward pushes the ambient air down into the lungs' (DSB). Swammerdam's theory, evolved in ignorance of Boyle's idea that the air has a springiness, was easily destroyed in the following year by John Mayow in his Tractatus duo (Oxford, 1668). Heirs of Hippocrates 602 'a classic on respiration'.