Traité de chimie anatomique et physiologique normale et pathologique ou des principes immédiats normaux et morbides qui constituent le corps de l’homme et des mammifères

Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1853. tlas with 45 plates (26 hand-colored). Text volumes in original printed wrappers, atlas in original printed boards, rebacked with corners worn. Ownership signature on the atlas of F.A. Alves with his small stamp on title. Francisco Antonio Alves (1832-1873) was chair of physiology and medicine at the University of Coimbra in Portugal and a co-author of a paper on chemical analyses of the water of Coimbra in 1871. First edition of this pioneering work in biochemistry. Robin sought to advance his belief that the future of biological research lay in chemical, not cellular, analysis. Written in collaboration with the chemist F. Verdeil, the book analyzes and compares the different components of human and animal tissues. The atlas depicts some twelve hundred crystalline forms of these compounds as they appear under the microscope. “For him [Robin] the real seat of life was constituted by the humoral parts of the organism. Beyond the fixed anatomical elements, there must be, he thought, a molecular organization that explained the morphology. In his opinion, therefore, microscopic investigation was only a stage of biological research and must be followed by chemical analysis.”

Robin (1821-1885) was one of the great micrographers of the nineteenth century. He studied medicine at the Faculté de Médécine in Paris where he assumed the chair in natural history. A protégé of Auguste Comte, he was won over to the idea of a general science of biology and helped to create the Société de Biologie to promote biological research in France. The Société wanted to distance themselves from what they perceived as the excessively narrow and practical focus of the mainstream of the Paris clinical school. “What is visible, at least in the Société’s stated program, is an unmistakable shift in the balance between physiology and pathology, and between pure science and its applications in the medical art” (Lesch). A prolific author, Robin’s influence waned with his reluctance to accept later advances in cellular biology, such as the discoveries of Pasteur and Virchow. Verdeil was an organic chemist who studied with Liebig publishing his first paper in 1846.

Bullock, History of bacteriology (1938), 392; DSB, XI, 491-492; Hirsch IV, 839; Lesch, Science and medicine in France (1984), 222-224; Waller 8054.