CESALPINO, ANDREA. 1519-1603.


Peripateticarum Quaestionum Libri Quinque. Venice: Giunta, 1571. 4to. 211 x 163 mm. Woodcut printer's device on title, a few woodcut diagrams in text, numerous wooduct initials, many historiated. Contemporary limp vellum; leather chemise and morocco slipcase. Title with minor staining to edges and stamp removed from blank margin, some dampstaining to upper inner margins, minor marginal worming, printing flaw on 02r affecting some letters, occasional pale spotting or light browning. Provenance: Haskell F. Norman (bookplate, his sale, Christie's New York, 18 March 1998, lot 61). FIRST EDITION of this rare work in a contemporary binding. "Cesalapino preceded Harvey in the discovery of the concept of the circulation, and Harvey must have known of his ideas, but Cesalapino's idea of the circulation was not supported by convincing experimental work or quantitative evidence" (Garrison-Morton). "In Quaestio IIII (ff. 107-112) of his Peripatetic problems, Cesalapino first made the critical point, repeated in his later works, that blood flows in a perpetual movement into the heart from the veins and from the heart to the arteries. This statement, as Pagel has noted, marked a 'breakaway from Galen and a stepping-stone for Harvey' ... Cesalapino 'replaced [Galen's doctrine] by the more sophisticated idea of arterio-venous plexuses in which the blood is conveyed to the organs by the arteries, although part of it comes from the veins. With this Cesalapinus seems to have taken a progressive step in the direction of the truth — however far this is still removed from Harvey's idea of the closed arterio-venous circle' ...." (Norman). Garrison-Morton 755; Norman 430 (this copy); Pagel William Harvey's Biological Ideas (1967) p 187; Waller 1877.