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MAYOW, John (1641-1679). Tractatus quinque medico-physici . Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1674.
MAYOW, John (1641-1679). Tractatus quinque medico-physici . Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1674. 8º (181 x 150mm). Engraved portrait of the author, 4 half-titles to treatises II-V, 6 folding plates at end. (Small adhesion on frontispiece and title with minor loss, some spotting, marginal paper flaw in Ss1.) Contemporary mottled calf tooled in blind, red edges (skilfully rebacked and recornered in brown morocco by Wigmore, lightly scuffed). Provenance : purchased by the Royal Institution in July 1815 for 13s at Leigh & Sotheby's. FIRST EDITION, including three previously unpublished essays and revised versions of the ground-breaking De respiratione and De rachitide , first published in 1668. In De sal-nitro et spiritu nitro-aereo , on combustion, respiration, the composition of the atmosphere, and aerial-nitrate, Mayow proved – at the same time as Hooke – that only a portion of air is used in respiration and combustion, by demonstrating that air in an enclosed space, when burned or breathed, is reduced only by one fourteenth. The two remaining treatises deal with the foetus’s respiration and muscular movement as source of body heat, providing the allegedly earliest description of mitral stenosis. The frontispiece portrait of him is attributed by Fulton to William Faithorne ‘Mayow was the first to locate the seat of animal heat in the muscles; he discovered the double articulation of the ribs with the spine and came near to discovering oxygen in his suggestion that the object of breathing was to abstract from the air a definite group of life-giving "particles". He was the first to make the definite suggestion that it was only a special fraction of the air that is of use in respiration. His Tractatus , embodying all his brilliant conclusions, is one of the best English medical classics’ (Garrison-Morton 578). ESTC R10053; Fulton, Two Oxford Physiologists 108; Garrison-Morton 578; Heirs of Hippocrates 631; NLM/Krivatsy 7653; Norman 1474; Wing M-1537; Waller 6392; Wellcome IV 93.