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Lot 2165

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Serres' study of conjoined twins Ritta-Christina

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Title: Recherches d'Anatomie Transcendante et Pathologique. Theorie des formations et des déformations organiques, appliquée à l'anatomie de Ritta Christina, et de la duplicité monstrueuse.
Author: Serres, [Etienne Rénauld Augustin]
Description: [4], 315 pp. With 20 double-page lithographed plates. 10½x8½, later half cloth & marbled boards.An anatomical study of "Rita-Christina," perhaps the best known of the two-headed "monsters." Rita and Cristina of Parodi of Sardinia, born in 1829, were dicephalus tetrabrachius (one body with four arms) twins and although they died at only eight months of age, they gained much attention as a curiosity when their parents exhibited them in Paris. "Autopsy revealed two hearts within a single pericardium, fused livers, duplication of the digestive organs down to the distal ileum, and a double uterus" - Speert, Obstetrics & Gynecology [2nd ed.], p. 399. The plates, sometimes issued in a separate atlas, offer other examples of incomplete twinning from Geoffroy Saint-Hilare, Duverney and others. Some of the plates are bound upside-down.
Heading: Place Published: Paris
Publisher: Firmin Didot Freres
Date Published: 1832