Jan Bleuland

A first edition of Icones Anatomico-Physiologicae Partium by Jan Bleuland.

• Jan Bleuland (Dutch).
• Icones Anatomico-Physiologicae Partium, ad anatomiam animalium pertinentium, quae in descriptione usei Academiae Rheno-Trajectinae inveniuntur.
• Utrecht: Johaan Altheer, 1826.
• 93 pages.
• With 30 color engravings with some colors applied by hand.
• 5 unopened text fascicles with original unattached blue paper cover sheets printed in black.
• Text in Latin.
• The whole never bound, and housed in a custom cloth folding case by Bainbridge Conservation.

First edition of one of the earliest works on the anatomy of tissues rather than organs or organ systems, and one of the earliest microscopical works printed in color. A never bound, unopened copy complete with all thirty plates and the original blue paper covers.

Jan Bleuland (1756-1838) attended the University of Leiden, where he learned the art of preserving anatomical specimens by injection under Eduard Sandifort. After graduating in 1780 he practised medicine in Gouda and taught anatomy, physiology, surgery, and obstetrics at the universities in Hardewijk and Utrecht. ‘During his career Bleuland published a number of illustrated anatomical works printed in colour, showing a special interest in the fine structure of healthy and diseased states of the organs and tunics of the digestive tract. Bleuland made a collection of over two and a half thousand anatomical preparations’ which he used to prepare his publications, and which were later purchased by the government for the Utrecht anatomical museum (Meli, ‘The Rise of Pathological Illustrations: Baillie, Bleuland, and Their Collections’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, volume 89, number 2, pp. 234- 235). ‘As in previous works he published, Bleuland was especially interested in the vascular structure of tunics and membranes and focused on what he called anatomia subtiliore, relying on microscopy’ (p. 236). He took advantage of a variety of new printing techniques, including copperplate engraving, aquatint, and lithography, to create different visual effects, even for different illustrations within the same work.  

The years of Bleuland’s professional life ‘witnessed major transformations both in medicine — involving notions of disease, hospital medicine, and clinical training — and in visual representations — with the rise of tonal printing processes and lithography’ (pp. 209-210). His works ‘occupy a significant role in the history of medicine: they reflected crucial transformation in the notion of disease, and, at the same time, played a key cognitive and heuristic role in those transformations by focusing on local lesions and structural changes’ (p. 210).