MAYOW, John.

Small 8vo, 1 leaf, 108 pages, 1 leaf (blank), 2 folding engraved plates. Separate title-page to the second tract dated 1668. Contemporary sheep, panelled in blind, nicely rebacked by Middleton with red morocco label on spine. Very good copy. Provenance: donation inscription dated 1714 on front free endpaper from John Hutton M.D. (physician to William III and physician-general to the army) by the library of the presbytery of Dumfries, to which Hutton had given all his books prior to his death in 1712; bookplate of John Yudkin (1910–1995, nutritionist).

FIRST EDITION, second issue with a cancel title-page dated 1669, one year after the first issue, of Mayow’s first book. “In October 1667 Hooke and Lower performed a pulmonary insufflation procedure whereby an incision was made in the lungs of a dog while it was kept alive by air being artificially pumped into the lungs with bellows. Hooke [G&M 916] believed this to be a crucial demonstration disproving the mechanical theory of respiration in favour of a chemical particulate theory that something extractable from the air powered the normal motions of respiration. The success of this brutal experiment in London inspired Mayow to write an essay on the mechanism of respiration, to which he coupled a medical essay on rickets… “In the tract on respiration Mayow described perfectly its mechanism, with the movement of ribs and diaphragm. He understood that the lungs were moved by the action of the diaphragm, and suggested that the internal and external intercostal muscles brought about the inspiration of air, which then expanded naturally into the enlarged space produced in the chest cavity. The function of breathing was not to cause the lungs to expand or to cool the blood, as William Harvey had thought, but to bring air in contact with the blood, to which it gave up its 'nitrum hoc aerium' ('aerial nitre')…” (from a long passage in ODNB). The second tract is on rickets, Mayow being the third English writer on the disease, and, next to Glisson, the most often quoted. He provides a clear clinical description of the disease and explains the curving of bones as impaired growth of muscles failing to grow in the same proportion as the bones to which they were attached. Wing M1536. Still, History of Paediatrics, pp. 227–229. Fulton, Two Oxford physiologists, 105, noting the rarity of both issues.