Crooke, Helkiah

Folio (330 x 200 mm), woodcut vignettes on title and over 150 woodcut illustrations in text. Contemporary calf, rebacked, spine gilt in 6 compartments. Occasional soiling and dampstaining, title-page repaired, outer margin repaired gatherings ¶-G, and 4M-4Q, affecting text to varying degrees, missing text supplied in pencil; boards somewhat stained, extremities rubbed. 

ESTC S4592; Heirs of Hippocrates 405; C. D. O'Malley, ‘Helkiah Crooke, MD, FRCP, 1576–1648’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 42 (1968), Russell 218; Wellcome 1683 

Folio (13 x 7 7/8 in.; 330 x 200 mm), woodcut vignettes on title and over 150 woodcut illustrations in text; contemporary calf, rebacked, spine gilt in 6 compartments. Occasional soiling and dampstaining, title-page repaired, outer margin repaired gatherings ¶-G, and 4M-4Q, affecting text to varying degrees, missing text supplied in pencil; boards somewhat stained, extremities rubbed.
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"THE LARGEST AND FULLEST ANATOMICAL WORK PRODUCED IN ENGLAND UP TO ITS DAY AND FOR A CONSIDERABLE TIME TO FOLLOW" (O'MALLEY, 11).

Crooke burst into public awareness in 1615 with the publication of Microcosmographia: a Description of the Body of Man. It was the first English language anatomy written by a physician, rather than a surgeon, and outraged many of his colleagues at the College of Physicians with its plates depicting the parts of the body involved in generation. The efforts of the bishop of London, the president of the college, Sir William Paddy, and other fellows to have the book suppressed were unsuccessful. Crooke had a stronger ally in James I, and in his printed epistle to the King, Crooke attacked physicians for their lack of reverence for the body in their own lectures to the barber–surgeons. Crooke never claimed originality, only the desire to make the best anatomical knowledge of the day available for the use of the surgeons. The book was enormously successful and was reprinted (along with an epitome by the Scottish surgeon Alexander Reid) in 1616 — as seen here — and 1618 (DNB).