Home / Browse / Photography / Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine ou analyse électro-physiologique de l'expression des passions.
DUCHENNE (DE BOULOGNE), Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand.
Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine ou analyse électro-physiologique de l'expression des passions.
First edition of this landmark in the history of clinical medical photography; presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper "A mon ami [the identity of the recipient erased, as often with French presentation inscriptions] Duchenne (de Boulogne)". Duchenne's iconographic work stands at the crossroads of three major discoveries of the nineteenth century: electricity, physiology and photography. Some of the photographs show Duchenne himself applying the surface electrodes used in his faradic technique; these were taken by Adrien Tournachon (1825-1903), the young brother of the celebrated Nadar (Felix Tournachon). Charles Darwin reproduced a number of Duchenne's photographs from the Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine to illustrate his own book on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). This is the regular trade (or "petite") edition, complete as issued in one volume with frontispiece and 155 photographs on 20 plates, sold for 20 francs. There was also an octavo format in two volumes, the "grande édition" with a separate and slightly taller atlas volume, with 84 photographs and the same 9 composite plates, priced 68 francs; and an "édition de luxe" of 100 copies in quarto with 74 larger format plates (in the earliest copies), at 200 francs. An early copy of the latter sold for €204,000 in 2004. A second edition, similarly divided into three formats, was published posthumously in 1876.
Large octavo (272 × 178 mm). Original gilt-lettered red morocco-grain cloth spine and front cover skilfully laid down over later red pebble grain cloth to style, original yellow free endpapers preserved. Leaf 10 misbound before 10*. Photographic frontispiece, 2 engravings in the text, 155 photographic images on 20 plates (9 composite plates with 16 small images each, 11 large single images); all albumen prints. With two bookseller's letters offering this copy to the biographer of Duchenne, Dr Paul Guilly, in 1960 taped to the later endpapers.
