1793. Large 4to, pp. [vi], 13, [3], [6] dedicatory poem to Campen printed in Dutch; with two large folding engraved plates, and with attractive woodcut title-page decoration, head- and tail-piece and initial; aside from some occasional very minor soiling and spotting, clean and bright; bound in full red morocco, covers elaborately tooled in gilt with central floral vignette and floral borders, spine in compartments with raised bands, tooled in gilt, all edges gilt and with attractive endpapers with tulip motif, head and tail of spine a little rubbed, with some minor surface wear, extremities a little bumped and bumped; a lovely, crisp wide-margined copy. A beautifully bound and printed medical doctoral thesis on teratology by Micael Johan van Campen (1767-?),submitted for examination on October 9th 1793 at the University of Leiden. Campen discusses in particular the case of a young girl missing one of her arms and both of her legs. The work is accompanied by two finely engraved folding plates. Campen discusses in some detail the work of the Italian physician Matteo Bazzani (1674-1749), and whose treatise on teratological lesions, was included in Geatano Tacconi’s De nonnullis cranii ossiumque fracturis published in Bologna in 1751, as well as referring to the work of Eduard Sandifort (1742-1814). He cites too, the noted contemporary case of Benoit Formaggini, who was born in Padua in August 1764, and who had become the focus of medical fascination across Europe.
The Anatomical Museum of Leiden became renowned for its teratological collections, with specimens acquired by more than a dozen collectors. Sandifort and his son Gerard (1779-1848) went on to describe the collection in full.