Institutiones Medicae

The founding of physiology. Second authorised edition of Boerhaave's famous medical lectures, presented at the University of Leiden in 1701 and first published in 1708, with an unauthorised German edition appearing in 1710.

'Boerhaave, a member of the faculty of medicine at the University of Leiden, exerted an enormous influence upon the teaching and practice of medicine in Europe. He is credited with systematizing medical knowledge, synthesizing the older Greek medical heritage with the discoveries of the seventeenth century to build a comprehensive contemporary medical doctrine. Institutiones medicae, his first book, was responsible, more than any other work, for establishing the study of physiology as an academic discipline. Boerhaave wrote it to serve as the textbook for his course in the institutes of medicine, a discipline including pathology, symptoms, hygiene, and therapeutics as well as physiology... the Institutiones was soon being used in every medical school in Europe' (Norman Library of Science and Medicine 255).

'The most remarkable example of his influence was in the medical school at Edinburgh. Alexander Monro primus. Edinburgh's first professor of anatomy, was his pupil, and Alexander St. Clair who gave a course of lectures commentating on the Institutiones, was the first to hold Edinburgh's chair of the Institutes of Medicine, the name of which was taken directly from the title of Boerhaave's work. At one monent, in 1726, the whole medical faculty at Edinburgh consisted of Boerhaave's pupils following his teaching. "Through his pupils he is the real founder of the Edinburgh medical School, and through it of the best medical teaching in the English-speaking countries of the world"' (Grolier Club, 100 Books Famous in Medicine 39).

Second edition; 8vo (55 x 9.5 cm); title printed in red and black, contemporary ownership signature to title, faint toning of the edges of the contents; contemporary speckled calf, spine elaborately gilt in compartments, 5 raised bands, edges red and blue speckled, loss from the head and tail of the spine which is cracked, some old conservation work and renewal of the gilt, a very good copy; 464pp.

For the first edition: Norman Library of Science and Medicine 255; Garrison-Morton, A Medical Bibliography 581; Grolier Club, 100 Books Famous in Medicine 39.