LANDMARK ENGRAVINGS BY MRS. WORMLEY. Micro-Chemistry of Poisons, including their Physiological, Pathological, and Legal Relations: adapted to the Use of the Medical Jurist, Physician, and General Chemist, with 78 illustrations upon steel

New York: Bailliere Brothers, 1867. First edition.

1867 LANDMARK COMPENDIUM OF POISONS WITH 78 FINE ENGRAVINGS BY AUTHOR'S WIFE ON 13 PLATES.

9 1/4 inches tall, 2 inches thick hardcover, publisher's pebbled brown cloth binding, gilt title to spine, ink signature second front free endpaper of A. E. Westbrook M.D., 1867, Ashley, Del. Co. O., i-xxxi, pp33-702, 13 steel engraved plates by Mrs. T. G. Wormley with tissue guards and facing descriptive text. Spine ends frayed, 1 inch split top of front joint and hinge, mottling to covers, light browning to page edges, binding tight, text pages and plates crisp and unmarked, very good minus in custom archival mylar cover.

THEODORE GEORGE WORMLEY (1826-1897), toxicologist and legal physician, was born at Wormleysburg, Pennsylvania, a town named after his ancestors. He entered the Philadelphia College of Medicine, in Philadelphia, where he received his degree in 1849. Wormley then began a practice in Columbus, Ohio in 1850. In 1852, he was appointed as the professor of chemistry and the natural sciences at Capitol University in Columbus, a position he held until 1865. In 1877 he moved to Philadelphia, where he was elected to the chair of chemistry and toxicology at the University of Pennsylvania. He held the chair almost twenty years.

"Wormley was a very extensive writer, his magnum opus being a large volume entitled, 'The Micro-chemistry of Poisons,' 1867. Of this world-famous book it is well-nigh impossible to speak in terms of too high praise. Though the work is large , it is very concisely written, and is characterized throughout by the ripest and fullest scholarship and the most painstaking accuracy. Never before perhaps had toxicological subjects been handled with quite the high degree of literary skill and the miraculous care for detail and truth which appear in this volume. The work soon became known throughout the medicolegal world. This work is dedicated 'To my wife, who, by her skilful hand, assisted so largely in its preparation, this volume is affectionately inscribed.' At the bottom of each page we read, "Mrs. T. G. Wormley, ad. nat. del. et sculp." It is told by Dr. John Ashhurst, Jr., that, when the manuscript of the book was handed to the publishers, the latter declared that it would be impossible to find a draughtsman capable of reproducing the illustrations by which the manuscript was accompanied, so great was their exquisite delicacy. In fact, a number of engravers, to whom the matter of reproducing these illustrations was submitted, declared (according to the American Literary Gazette) that the work, assuming that it could be done at all, would cost the engraver who did it, his sight. Thereupon Mrs. Wormley set herself to work to acquire the difficult art of engraving on steel. This feat she accomplished to such a degree that the desired engravings were produced by her hand and remain to this day a marvel of the steel engraver's art."--American Medical Biographies (1920).