De Homine Figuris Et Latinitate Donatus A Florentio Schuyl. Descartes, René Anatomie Und Physiologie

Lugduni Batavorum: Apud Franciscum Moyardum & Petrum Leffen, 1662, 4°, (36), 121 pp. (123, 111/112 repeated, (1 p.) Nota, 56 woodcut and engraved text-illustrations, 10 engraved plates, contemporary vellum; complete fine copy. First Edition! Complete with all 56 woodcut and engraved text-illustrations (many of which are full-page) and the 10 full-page engraved plates (several folded), one of which is the heart-plate with the 6 moveable parts, the Cardiac-flaps. This edition was posthumously published and translation by Florentius Schuy. A seminal work, René Descartes (1596-1650) 'Treatise on man', is known as the first European textbook of physiology, and the first purely mechanistic account of bodily functions. "In the Treatise of man, Descartes did not describe man, but a kind of conceptual models of man, namely creatures, created by God, which consist of two ingredients, a body and a soul. "These men will be composed, as we are, of a soul and a body. First I must describe the body on its own; then the soul, again on its own; and finally I must show how these two natures would have to be joined and united in order to constitute men who resemble us"." (SEP). "This highly influential work was the first to present a coherent description of bodily responses in neurophysiological terms that are still, to a wide extent, accepted today. In his attempt to solve the central question around which almost all philosophical thought had revolved since the time of Aristotle, what the relation between the soul and the body actually is, Descartes came to create a milestone work of physiology which changed the entire trajectory of modern physiological conceptions. "Without Descartes, the seventeenth-century mechanization of physiological conceptions would have been inconceivable." He believed that the relationship between the soul and the body was mediated by the brain and the nervous system, and his seminal attempts to explain neural mechanisms drew a great deal on the engineering developments of his time. He developed a hydro-mechanical theory of how the soul controlled the contraction of muscle through the intermediary of the pineal and the cerebral ventricles, and he produced an explanation of how it received, through the nerves from the periphery, signals that gave rise to sensation. Descartes' theories quickly spread throughout Europe, and the work in which he had developed them, his "De Homine" became extremely influential. "Descartes was one of the first to embrace Harvey's doctrine of the circulation and the book opens with an account of the cardiovascular system, illustrated by a plate of the heart with movable flaps. From a mechanistic survey of general physiology, Descartes moves to the nervous system which he treats in great detail. Particularly important is his discussion of the eye (drawing on Kepler for the optical part) and the physiology of perception. 'The impact of the Cartesian physiological program, once it was publicly known, was enormous. In two ways -philosophically and physiologically -Descartes transformed long-standing beliefs about animals and men. Philosophically, of course, his notions of mind-body dualism and animal automatism had extremely important implications that were not lost on Henry More, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz, along with many others in the seventeenth century . But physiologically, too, Descartes' conceptions had an impact that in many ways was even more impressive than the philosophical influence, because it affected the actual course of contemporary science'. (DSB). Descartes was prepared to publish this book in 1633 but decided to withhold it when he learned of Galileo's condemnation by the Church. As a result, the first edition was not published until 1662. This first Latin translation (De homine) by Florentius Schuyl in 1662 was probably much more widely read than the two years later published French edition. Guibert mentions two .