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HOFMANN, Dr. E[duard] von.
Atlas of Legal Medicine.
Authorized Translation from the German. Edited by Frederick Peterson, M.D. … Assisted by Aloysius O. J. Kelly, M.D. …
Publisher: Philadelphia and London: W. B. Saunders & Company, 1898
Stock code: 61237
Price: £450 Currency Conversion
First edition of this translation issued in the well-received Saunders' Medical Hand-Atlases series, published the same year as the book's first appearance in German, Atlas der gerichtlichen medizin to accompany Hofmann's Lehrbuch. Hofmann exercised considerable influence on the development of forensic medicine as a separate area of scientific study, and is credited with introducing and expanding the employment of methodologies such as microscopy, spectroscopy and laboratory animal experimentation in the field. This 'medicolegal' textbook contains a substantial collection of graphical illustrations "entirely original …prepared either from recent cases or from museum specimens" (Author's Preface). Amongst these can be seen the results of poisonings, suicides and/or murders from hanging, stabbing, shooting, attack with blunt instruments, burning and suffocation, particularly of new-born infants. "There is perhaps no field of science in which the value of illustration is greater than in forensic medicine. The problems which confront the coroner, the post-mortem examiner, and the courts of law must be solved by the presentation of indisputable facts. Many of these facts can be fully appreciated and understood only by the medicolegal expert of years of experience. But a volume such as this, made up chiefly of photographs and original drawings of various lesions and pathological conditions, taken directly from actual cases, supplies to every physician and student an enormous array of medicolegal data, such as would take one many years to acquire alone and unaided. This volume is a veritable treasure-house of information, gained from the rich material of one of the greatest institutes of legal medicine in the world, and collected by one who, until his death … was perhaps the ablest living expert in his chosen domain of work" (Preface to the Translation). Uncommon in any edition, this is an unusually nice copy of the first.
Octavo, original green cloth, title gilt to spine. 56 chromolithograph plates and 193 photographic illustrations on 87 sheets. Very slightly rubbed, mild stain to the bottom edge with slight encroachment into the tail margin, but overall a very good copy.
