Contemporary full calf. Boards ruled in gilt. Spine elaborately stamped in gilt with tan spine label, lettered in blind. All edges speckled red. Hinges cracked but firm. Spine chipped at head and tail. Corners and edges a bit rubbed and bumped. Back board with a few chips. Sporadic dampstaining along top margin. Final few leaves and endpapers with some toning and staining. Overall very good.

"Whytt's interest in the sensibility and co-ordination of the nerves led to a major work on nervous diseases in 1764. It has been suggested that this work helped to make ‘nervous disease’ a fashionable term, replacing ‘the vapours’—a remnant of humoral pathology. Whytt's doctrine was that the part of the soul resident in the sensory nerves was so bound by the laws of union of body and soul that it allowed each nerve to transmit only its own kind of stimulus to the brain and spinal cord. Here the soul, acting as a kind of common sensory agent, redirected the stimulus to appropriate motor nerves. This accounted for the ‘sympathy’ of the parts of the body, many of them later recognized to be under the control of the sympathetic nervous system." (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

HBS # 65812 $1,750