Rare popular anatomy by the neurologist who identified bell's palsy. First and only edition of this rare popular work by the anatomist, neurologist, and artist Charles Bell (1774-1842), with twenty simple but attractive hand-coloured lithographs, likely by the author. WorldCat locates only eighteen copies, and it is not listed in auction records or in the Garrison-Morton Medical Bibliography.

Bell undertook his surgical training in Edinburgh during the 1890s, and at the same time studied art with the painter David Allen, publishing his System of Dissections, a guide for anatomy students, while himself still a student in 1798. 'In 1802 he published The Anatomy of the Brain, Explained in a Series of Engravings. He provided his own illustrations to this work, and insisted that in this department of anatomy in particular the task could not be left to an artist who lacked a training in the field... Along with [his brother] John Bell he also published an Anatomy of the Human Body. Charles's special contribution on the anatomy of the brain and nerves appeared in 1804. The work passed through numerous editions' (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

As a surgeon in London after 1804 Bell continued developing his special interest in the nervous system, and set out to show that the brain was not an undifferentiated mass, but that its parts had separate functions, which could be proved anatomically by severing the nerves leading to the rest of the body. The results were published in 1811 in Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain, though priority for the more sophisticated and correct version of the discovery is usually awarded to the French physiologist François Magendie.

In the introduction to this volume, which was intended for general readers or older children, Bell writes, 'that the organs of the senses are most wonderfully contrived, is so generally known as to amount to a truism: but how few are those who have even the slightest idea of their structure... it is hoped, that a short treatise, describing in plain and common terms the several parts and connexions of these organs... will afford a general and easy comprehension of their nature, and accompanied by several coloured plates, will not be either uninteresting or uninstructive'. The plates focus primarily on the eyes, including the lens's effect on light passing through it and the facial muscles and bones of the skull around them, and there are also plates on the ear and tongue.

First edition; 8vo; 20 hand-coloured lithographic plates, contents tanned and foxed, stab holes to fore-edges of plates, final leaf and rear blank opened clumsily leaving a portion of the latter attached to the former; original green cloth blocked in blind, rebacked in green cloth with gilt title in 20th-century typeface, corners worn, cloth rubbed and darkened with a few small marks, hinges repaired, very good condition; 85pp.

Jeffrey, Sir Charles Bell 23, p217.