Larynx and Trachea

The Larynx and Trachea

‘The Head of the Rough Artery, or the Beginning, continuous to the Mouth, is call’d the Larynx, from λαρυγγίζω, to call with a wide Throat, and is the Organ of Speech, and fram’d of several Gristles and Muscles, for the forming and expressing of Words’.

Ysbrand van Diemerbroeck, The Anatomy of Human Bodies translated by
William Salmon (London, 1689), p. 367.[1]

Giulio Cesare Casseri, De vocis auditusque organis historia anatomica singulari fide methodo ac industria concinnata tractativus duobus explicata ac variis iconibus aere excusis illustrata … (Ferrara, 1601), Tabula I.

Giulio Cesare Casseri (fl, 1552–1616), was the author of a seminal book on voice production and the organs of the ear: De vocis auditusque organis historia anatomica singulari fide methodo ac industria concinnata tractativus duobus explicata ac variis iconibus aere excusis illustrata … (Ferrara, 1601). In it Casseri, a professor of anatomy at the University of Padua in the sixteenth century, produced a precise description of the larynx, and accompanied his text with wonderful illustrations of the muscles and nerves of the larynx. As Housman et al. note, Casseri correctly described the larynx as a cartilaginous structure.[2] In the image below, Casseri depicts the laryngeal ventricles and muscles of the larynx. As Wysocki et al. note, he was the first to describe the skeleton of the human larynx and was the first to discuss sublingual glands and their ducts before Nicola Steno (1638–86).[3] Elsewhere in the text, Casseri illustrated a laryngotomy.

The striking illustrations of De vocis auditusque organis historia anatomica singulari fide methodo ac industria concinnata tractativus duobus explicata ac variis iconibus aere excusis illustrata … (Ferrara, 1601) are not Casseri’s only masterpieces of anatomical art. In his famed Tabulae anatomica (Venice, 1627), plates of which were re-used in Worth’s copy of Adriaan van den Spiegel’s Opera quae extant omnia ex recensione Joh. Antonidae vander Linden (Amsterdam, 1645), we can see the influence of some Vesalian poses. Wysocki et al, suggest that Casseri’s rivalry with Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente (1537–1619), (explored in the sixteenth-century Padua web page), may have influenced his choice of illustrative style, as he sought to recreate the dramatized movement of Vesalius’ illustration, as a contrast to the most prosaic illustration of Fabricius, which focused more on a strict scientific approach to illustration.[4]

His illustrations proved to be popular and continued to be re-used throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As a mid-nineteenth-century commentator noted of Casseri’s illustrations in his Tabulae Anatomicae:

‘Casserius plates mark a new epoch in the history of anatomic representation, owing to the correctness of the anatomic drawing, their tasteful arrangement, and the beauty of their technical execution. And this all the more, since they cover the whole field of anatomy and have become the models for anatomic illustrations in copper, just as the Vesalian representations had been for anatomic woodcuts’.[5]

Text: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library, Dublin.

Sources

Housman, Brian, et al., ‘Giulio Cesare Casseri (c_.1552–1616): The servant who became an anatomist’, Clinical Anatomy, 27 (2014), 675–80.

Riva, Alessandro et al., ‘Iulius Casserius (1552–1616): The self-made anatomist of Padua’s Golden Age’, Anatomical Record (New Anat.), 265 (2001), 168–75.

Roberts, K.B. and J.D.W. Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body. European Traditions of Anatomical illustration (Oxford, 1992).

Van Diemerbroeck, Ysbrand, The Anatomy of Human Bodies … translated by William Salmon (London, 1689).

Wysocki, Michael et al., ‘Iulius Casserius: revolutionary anatomist, teacher and pioneer of the sixteenth and seventeenth century’, Anat. Sci. Int., 91 (2016), 217–225.

Żytkowski, Andrzej and Jerzy Walocha, ‘Anatomical studies on larynx and voice production in historical perspective’, Polia Medica Cracoviensia, LX, no. 3 (2020), 85–98.

[1] This English translation is not in the Worth Library: Worth owned the 1679 Genevan Latin edition.

[2] Housman, Brian, et al., ‘Giulio Cesare Casseri (c_.1552–1616): The servant who became an anatomist’, Clinical Anatomy, 27 (2014), 679.

[3] Wysocki, Michael et al., ‘Iulius Casserius: revolutionary anatomist, teacher and pioneer of the sixteenth and seventeenth century’, Anat. Sci. Int., 91 (2016), 220.

[4] Ibid., p. 223.

[5] Cited in Housman, Brian, et al., ‘Giulio Cesare Casseri (c_.1552–1616): The servant who became an anatomist’, Clinical Anatomy, 27 (2014), 680.