Alfred Donné Sold at Auction Prices

Donne, Alfred Francois (1801-1878) Cours de Microscopie Complementaire des Etudes Medicales. Paris: Bailliere, 1845. First edition, fol

Donne, Alfred Francois (1801-1878) Cours de Microscopie Complementaire des Etudes Medicales. Paris: Bailliere, 1845. First edition, folio, illustrated with twenty plates comprising eight-six microdaguerreotype images taken by Leon Foucault, bound in the original publisher's boards, scuffed, foxing to half-title and first plate. Cutting-edge daguerreotype technology was almost instantly pressed into the service of science. Every other scientific image reproduced in books up to this moment had been mediated by the artist's hand and eye. Donne's use of photographic technology facilitated a more objective view of the blood cells, crystals, sperm cells, and other subjects examined under the microscope. This work contains the first description of the microscopic appearance of leukemia, whose presence Donne linked with abnormal blood pathology.