Seeing Is Believing - a history of illustration

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 1999 by Jennifer B. Lee, Miriam Mandelbaum

Seven centuries of illustrations look back at the artistry and skill that gave visual expression to the wonders of science and medicine.

As botanist Leonhart Fuchs noted in the introduction to his 1542 book on medicinal plants, pictures can communicate information much more clearly than the words of even the most eloquent men. In the 20th century, Ronald N. Giere, a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, suggested that scientific theory is more like a picture than anything that can be captured in words. Indeed, scientific and medical illustration often allows a reader to "see" information that cannot actually be seen by using different methods to show various kinds of theory or reality. Images such as astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus' simple diagram of the solar system and naturalist Charles Darwin's chart of the evolutionary tree present theories based on careful study.

Other images--such as physician Andreas Vesalius' elegant drawings of the muscles of the human body, naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian's depictions of an insect in its various stages of metamorphosis, and artist and astronomer Etienne Leopold Trouvelot's glorious attempts to capture the wonders of the heavens--are based on observed, though selective, reality. A third type of image shows the way to conduct an experiment or procedure, or simply the equipment needed. Examples include artist Albrecht Durer's use of perspective in drawing a lute, astronomer/astrologist Petrus Apianus' astronomical devices, and the equipment chemist Robert Boyle used in his experiments on air.

An exhibition at The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library presents a selection of scientific and medical illustrations dating from the 13th century through the beginning of the 20th century, drawn primarily from the collections of illustrated books of science and medicine in the Library's four research centers, augmented by materials from The New York Academy of Medicine and from a private collector.

At its founding in 1895, The New York Public Library already possessed a splendid array of important books in the fields of science and medicine. These were to come to the new library from the two private collections whose merger, along with a bequest from the Tilden Trust from the estate of Samuel J. Tilden, former governor of New York, created the new institution. The first of those private collections, the Astor Library, founded in 1848 through the bequest of fur trader/philanthropist John Jacob Astor, was very strong in first and early editions of astronomy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, medicine, natural history, and microscopy. The Astor Library included such great medical works as the extremely rare first edition of physician William Harvey's landmark treatise on the circulation of the blood (1628) and anatomist William Hunter's work on the stages of pregnancy (1774). In the sciences, it included the first edition of Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) (1543); scientist Robert Hooke's Micrographia or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (1665); and a full set of Trouvelot's Astronomical Drawings (1882).

The Lenox Library, which was founded in 1876 through the bequest of James Lenox, a merchant, real estate magnate, and collector, included many important books on science and medicine, as well as numerous volumes on natural history from the collection of Robert Leighton Stuart, which had become part of the Lenox Library in 1892. The Lenox Library owned not only the original elephant folio edition of ornithologist John James Audubon's Birds of America (1827-38), but a full set of the never-completed American reprint, made by printer Julius Bien using the process of chromolithography (1860-61). The Stuart Collection included a copy of the first English edition of Greek mathematician Euclid's Elements (1570) and a copy of painter-poet Edward Lear's magnificent Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots (1832), the first illustrated work of ornithology devoted to a single family of birds.

John Shaw Billlings, the first director of The New York Public Library, also was a physician of considerable stature. He had been Assistant Surgeon General of the U.S. and head of Johns Hopkins Medical School prior to his appointment at the Library. He was a friend and colleague of Sir William Osler, the noted physician and bookman who generously bestowed first editions of Vesalius' landmark work on human anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica (1543), on various libraries, including the Library of Congress and The New York Academy of Medicine. (It is conjectured that Osler did not donate a copy to The New York Public Library because he knew that the Academy's copy would be available to the general public.) The first Vesalius Fabrica to come to The New York Public Library was the second folio edition (1555), part of the original bequest that formed the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. The Berg brothers, whose principal collecting interest was 19th-century British and American literature, were both prominent New York physicians.