Anatomical exercitations concerning the generation of living creatures
William Harvey, 1653
Adoption amount: $1000.00
About this book
'Printed by James Young, for Octavian Pulleyn, and to be sold at his shop at the Sign of the Rose in St. Paul's Churchyard. 1653'. Sm. 8vo., 22 II 23 pp. 566, 1 errata.
First edition in English.
"Garrison & Morton list the Latin original of 1651 as "the most important book on the subject to appear during the 17th century...Harvey was among the first to believe the erroneous doctrine of the "preformation" of the foetus; he maintained that the organism derived from the ovum by the gradual building up and aggregation of its parts. The chapter on midwifery in this book is the first work on that subject to be written by an Englishman."
Harvey developed the first fundamentally new theory of generation since antiquity and his work represents a major advance in the study of animal reproduction; he himself considered his De generatione animalium to be of greater scientific importance than De motu cordis (Norman 1011).
