Quain, Surgical Anatomy, 1844
Professor Quain, F.R.S., The Surgical Anatomy of the Human Body, in Eighty-Seven Drawings Imperial Folio, the Figures the Size of Life, Drawn from Nature, and on Stone, By Joseph Maclise, M.R.C.S. Accompanied with an Octavo Volume of Letter-Press. London: Taylor & Walton, Upper Gower Street. Price [GBP] 10 12s. Unbound. 1844.
Atlas only. Never bound.
87 unbound plates with title sheet and two sheet of preliminaries (printed on rectos only). Housed in an early chemise of marbled paper over boards, with paper title labels on spine and on front board, and with green ribbon ties. Mildly and variably foxed (most very bright and uninvolved). Title leaf slightly toned. Damp stain affecting one coroner of Plate 3 (affects only an artistically soft edge, not the detailed anatomy at center of image). Plates 47 and 48 on slightly smaller paper and stamped “London hospital medical college”, thus apparently supplied from another copy. Plate 71 mottled at its center (not affecting the illustrated anatomy of the two figures on the plate). A few small marginal tears on some plates, not affecting images. All sheets a bit wavy, likely due to humidity at some point.
See G-M13300, Jones Quain (1796 – 1865), five volumes on anatomy in folio, of which the plates we offer here are a subset: “The most ambitious 19th century English anatomy illustrated by lithography. Some copies were issued with hand-colored plates. The five volumes, containing a total of 201 plates, describe the muscles, blood vessels, nerves, viscera, and bones and ligaments. Wilson designed the plates for this work, and signed some of them, but the plates were actually drawn by other artists, including J. Walsh and William Bagg, a portrait painter in London. Wilson also co-edited the second through fifth volumes. The section on the anatomy of the nerves is especially notable, with thirty-eight plates, including ten elegant colored plates of the brain and spinal cord, and a stunning colored plate showing the distribution of the eighth pair of nerves.”
Joseph Maclise, 1815 – 1880.
Heirs of Hippocrates 954: “Maclise was a student of Samuel Cooper and a prominent London surgeon."
See also G-M 13302: "The drawings of Maclise for Quain's Anatomy of the arteries and for his own Surgical anatomy are indeed done, as Quain wrote, with spirit and effect. These figures of anatomical dissection seem lifelike; in many plates the figure is shown as a torso, or a bust, or as a full-or half-length figure. The faces seem to be a gallery of portraits, perhaps of visitors to the 1851 Great Exhibition. They are mostly young men with fine hair-bearded, clean-shaven, or mustachioed, with or without sideburns; occasionally there are remarkably handsome black men. Many appear god-like. This is indeed 'high' art, only incidentally of an anatomical subject. If the analogy is not too far-fetched, Maclise's drawing may be compared with the work in different media of the English Romantic poets or of the composer Berlioz. The same comparisons have been made in relation to the work of the Victorian artist Daniel Maclise (1806-70), Joseph Maclise's older brother. They remained close, traveling in Italy together, and sharing houses in Bloomsbury and Chelsea" (Roberts & Tomlinson p. 564)
Regarding the five-volume original set, Heirs 887 states, “This elaborate series of anatomical plates and accompanying descriptions ranks with the best nineteenth-century representations. … Quain was an anatomist and teacher of some note whose Elements of descriptive and practical anatomy (1828) went through eleven editions. Wilson, who co-edited the second through the fifth volumes, was a dermatologist and philanthropist whose fame rests largely on the role he played in the demise of flogging in the British army.” (Heirs 887).
See also G-M 410, regarding Quain’s 1828 book: “Among the most important of the English textbooks on anatomy. An eleventh edition was published in 1908-29.”
