Ars memorativa
Publisher Information: Paris: in chalcographia Jodoci Badii Ascensi, 1520.
Le Lièvre [Leporis], Guillaume. Ars memorativa Gulielmi Leporei Avallonensis. 4to. 32ff. Woodcut title vignette and three large woodcut illustrations. [Paris:] N.p., 1520. 205 x 143 mm. Modern limp vellum. Marginal repairs to several leaves, affecting some words but preserving legibility. Very good copy with large margins. A few marginal notations in an early hand.
Rare First Edition. OCLC cites only four copies in North American libraries (NYPL, Harvard, U. Mich., NLM) and five in European libraries (Leipzig Univ., Koninklijke Bibl. Netherlands, Bibliothèque Nationale, U. Complutense Madrid, Bayerische Staatsbibl.).
Le Lièvre’s book is one of the earliest printed books on the brain to illustrate its functions—such as memory, imagination, reason, cognition and sensory processing—and to localize them within ventricular chambers or “cells.” The “cell doctrine” of brain function, which originated with Herophilus of Alexandria (ca. 300 BCE), was later developed by Galen in the second century CE and had considerable influence on medieval philosophers and physicians. Le Lièvre’s well-known woodcut illustration of the cell doctrine, adapted from Reisch’s Margarita philosophica (1503), shows three freely communicating “cells” separated by the vermis (choroid plexus), which was thought to control the flow of information between the first and second cells. Clarke & Dewhurst, An Illustrated History of Brain Function, pp. 38-39.
Book Id: 50577Price: $20,000.00