He was the world-famous pediatrician and neuro-surgeon who in 2016 famously led a team of over 40 in a pioneering, 27-hour craniophagous operation to safely separate conjoined 13-month-old twins.
Early works in the December 10 sale included, at $14,000 (£10,445), a copy of Giacomo Berengaria da Carpi’s Tractatus de fractura calve sive cranei that in 1998 had been part of the great Haskell F Norman library dispersed by Christie’s New York.
Printed in Bologna in 1518, this woodcut-illustrated work is the first separate treatise on head injuries and their neuro-surgical treatment. The author had attended to Lorenzo de Medici following a gunshot wound and a skull fracture received in battle.
Another 16th century success was a 1546, Basel first of Epistola rationem modumque propinandi radicis Chynae decocti… by Andreas Vesalius, which sold at $22,000 (£16,540). A work on the discovery and therapeutic use of the ‘china root’ in the treatment of syphilis, this work is also a major source for details of Vesalius’ life.
Venetian Vesalius
Sold at $30,000 (£22,555) was a 1568 Venetian edition of Vesalius’ greatest literary monument, De humani corporis fabrica…, that was purchased in 1680 by Robert Hooke, and the most expensive of the lots in this first Goodrich sale was a copy of Hooke’s own great literary and pictorial landmark, his Micrographia of 1665.
Containing 35 engraved plates, mostly folding, illustrating his …physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses, it made $55,000 (£41,355).
Sold at a record $14,000 (£10,525) was a 1695 copy of Humphrey Ridley’s Anatomy of the Brain, the first monograph in English devoted entirely to the subject, and in this instance a copy recorded by its first owner, Edward Bedingfeld, as being a gift from the author.
