De puella monstrosa, Lipsiae d. XXI. Maj. anno MDCCXII.
1717. Lipsiae, Litteris Immanuelis Titii. [Leipzig, 1717].
Sm. 4to, 33, 1 (blank) pp. A4 (-A4) B-D4 E2. Engraved frontispiece and one other illustration, woodcut initial and tailpiece. Plain modern wrappers, old manuscript library mark "No. 29" in top right corner of title page, right side of title page text trimmed very close but entirely legible. A largely clean and well-preserved copy.
§ First (and only) printing of this medical thesis on congenital abnormalities by Heinrich Mylius (1696-1721), supervised by Augustus Quirinus Rivinus (1652–1723). It describes a case of encephalocele, a neural tube defect; the frontispiece depicts the patient (a modern chair of neurology hypothesizes encephalomeningocele from the image). The illustration on page 17 is of a different individual with elaborate cutaneous horns. Mylius was a native of Leipzig. His thesis is dated October 22, 1717, a week after his 21st birthday and a week before he was awarded his doctoral degree in medicine. His supervisor Augustus Rivinus, also known as August Bachmann, was a German physician who became both the chair physiology and of botany at the University of Leipzig and the curator of the University's medical garden. He was best known for his contributions to botanical taxonomy, later used by Carl Linnaeus, and for a fascination with sunspots which led to his blindness.
This thesis sometimes appears bound in a collection of ten from the University of Leipzig published in the same year. Copies located on FirstSearch in the US include Harvard and Stanford Medical libraries, the Huntington Library, and the National Library of Medicine. As might be expected it is more widely held in European libraries, 4 copies in France and several in Germany. Item #122978
Price: $1,250.00