Author: Bilharz, T. [M.]
Title: Das electrische Organ des Zitterwelses, anatomisch beschrieben.
Description: Leipzig, Wilhelm Engelmann, 1857. Folio (34.3 x 25.1 cm). 58 pp., four tinted lithographed plates. Contemporary blind half cloth over marbled boards. Original printed wrappers bound in. = Theodor Maximilian Bilharz (1825-1862) was a German physician and an important pioneer in the field of parasitology. He took an early interest in entomology and studied medicine at the University of Tübingen. In 1847 he won the medical faculty's prize competition for his dissertation on the blood of invertebrates. In 1850 he accompanied his former teacher, Wilhelm Griesinger, to Egypt and became the first chief of surgery at the Kasr-el-Aini Medical School of Cairo. There he also held the position of senior consultant for the department of internal medicine, and also served in the military where he achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1851, during an autopsy, he discovered the trematode worm that is the cause of urinary schistosomiasis, initially naming it Distomum haematobium. It was subsequently noted that only one of the suckers contained an oral cavity, and in 1856 Heinrich Meckel von Hemsbach proposed that the organism be renamed Bilharzia haematobium. In 1858 Weinland proposed the name Schistosoma (Greek: 'split body') after the male worms' morphology, and the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature officially adopted the name Schistosoma haematobium, but the illness is still named Bilharziasis. In 1853 Bilharz became chief of medicine, and in 1856 he was appointed Professor of Anatomy. Bilharz died at the age of 37 of typhus while on an expedition to Massawa at the Eritrean Red Sea coast in 1862. The present anatomical work was made between 1852 and 1856 in Egypt. Interestingly, he considered this work on the electric eel as more important than his microbiological studies. Cancelled stamp of the publisher's library in the margin of the front flyleaf, small chip to the front wrapper, internally clean. In all a very good copy of this rare work. Dean I, p. 112; Nissen ZBI, 365.

Keywords: