Traite d'Anatomie tome premier osteologie.A LHermitage, 1777.

FIBRE THEORY FROM AN ANATOMICAL CONNOISSEUR

Title lettered in stencil with red and green ink, stencilled floral ornament throughout in red and green, ruled in brown. 

MANUSCRIPT ON PAPER. 8vo (160x95mm). [54] unnumbered leaves. Red morocco, triple gilt fillet on covers with floral corner ornaments, spine gilt in compartments, blue silk pastedowns, a.e.g. (scuff to head of upper board, headcap chipped, wear to joints and extremities). 

A LHermitage, 1777.  

An attractive and unusual little volume of original essays on anatomy and osteology, addressed adoringly by the author, a 'St Farre', to his mother, and painstakingly illustrated with stencilled lettering and floral illustration. 

The text begins with a letter 'a ma tres chere maman', to whom St Farre dedicates the essays that follow which, he writes, are the fruit of her ambitions for him. 

What follows is a methodical series of essays on rudimentary anatomy, split into two sections. The first, 'notions preliminaires', lays the groundwork for the second section, 'Traité d'Osteologie'. The essays are written almost as primers to particular areas of medicine; 'Tome Premier' on the title page suggests that their presumably young author, St Farre, had ambitions for further volumes. At a later point he explains that the five areas that make up Sarcology, or 'soft' parts of the human body, will be treated in their own separate treatises, distinct from this initial study of bones. We have been unable to find any such subsequent works, and the lack of volume numbering on the binding might indicate that this was the sole output. 

St Farre's description of anatomy reveals that this manuscript was compiled at an interesting point in the development of scientific understanding of human biology and physiology in the eighteenth century; the transition from the so-called 'pre-modern', humoral body, to the 'modern' body, via 'fibre' theory.  St Farre describes 'fibres' here as the basic building blocks of 'toutes les parties du corps'. Evident as early as the sixteenth century in the work of Vesalius and Jean Fernel, 'from around 1750 the fibre becomes, through its passive and active properties, the main operative building block and at the same time the first unifying principle of function-structure complexes of organic bodies' (Cheung, 'Omnis Fibra ex Fibra', 67). Proponents of the theory - including, in the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot and Charles Bonnet, Swedenborg and Haller - asserted that every element of an organism was made up of interlinking, delicate fibres, woven together to form different parts of the body. So, a group of fibres creates a membrane; a group of membranes together constitutes a small vessel; in turn, a large vessel, and so on. 'Fibre anatomists conceived the solid body not so much as a physically dense matter, but as a delicate, fragile and flexible entity interwoven of unimaginably slender threads and extremely tenuous membranes.' (Ishizuka, 'Fibre Body').

In keeping with dominant thought on the role of fibres as 'tube-like' structures, here they are described by St Farre as 'deliés et cylindriques', fine and cylindrical, with two properties, 'le sentiment et le mouvement' and of different types according to their function; so, for example, bones were thought to be composed of 'bony' fibres, and accordingly, here, St Farre describes 'les fibres osseuses [qui] servent a former les os'; 'ligamentary' fibres that form ligaments, nervous fibres that form nerves, 'membranous' fibres that form membranes and so on. 

The second, longer half of the manuscript deals with osteology, working from the skull, the seat of our 'esprits animaux', downwards, via the spine, ribs, hips, coccyx and sacrum, and then on to the extremities - arms and hands, legs and feet. His treatment of osteology ends with a short section on the maladies that bones can succumb to, in two groups; those affecting joints (among them dislocation, distention of ligaments, hydropsy, or oedema) and those affecting the material of the bones themselves (among them fractures, rot and rickets). St Farre is at pains to correct the common misconception that women have one more rib than men - based on the biblical origins of women, made from Adam's rib - and spends sometime on the importance of dental hygiene. More than just ornaments, a full complement of teeth is indispensable to those whose job obliges them to speak in public - lawyers, those preaching from the pulpit - and there is no remedy, St Farre warns, for negligence. The text ends with another homage to his mother. 

The binding and stencilled ornaments indicate that this is evidently a fair, rather than working copy of this text, presumably intended as a gift; the absent-minded repetition of a sentence describing the sphenoid suggests that it is a copy, written up, of an already written text. We have been unable to trace St Farre, nor find a record of any institutions or places of medical instruction by the name of 'L'Hermitage' in France in this period, though Hermitage is an important wine-making region in the Rhone valley. Anatomy was a fashionable 'pastime' for the wealthy in eighteenth-century France, with anatomical breakthroughs in the long Enlightenment encouraging a growing fascination with bodies. With some (false?) humility, St Farre explains that he would never pretend to count himself amongst experts, or aspire to their expertise; he seeks only to admire them from a distance, and follow their writings and operations. Perhaps, then, he was a budding anatomical 'connoisseur', rather than one seeking to make his mark as a practitioner. 

Provenance: C19th armorial library label of the Bibliothèque du Château d'Ablon, near Le Havre, built in the eighteenth century on the plot of an original, thirteenth-century castle, destroyed during the 100 Years' War; seat of the Brévedent d'Ablon family. 

Stock Code: 245311