MAGNI (Pietro Paolo). Discorsi intorno al sanguinar i corpi humani il modo di ataccare le sanguisuche e Ventose e far frittioni e vesicatorii... Roma, Bartolomeo Bonfadino e Tito Diani, 1584. In-4, vellum, spine ribbed, gilt coat of arms repeated between the spines (Binding of the period). 6ff (including the engraved illustrated title) , 106pp, 1f - 11 full-page engraved illustrations out-of-text included in the pagination. Very rare first edition of a treatise on the practice of bloodletting and the use of leeches in medicine by Pietro Paolo Magni, a surgeon from Piacenza who practised as a military doctor in Piedmont and then in Spain before settling in Rome. First edition of the superb illustration (architectural title and 11 plates showing bleeding and leeching) engraved by Adamo Ghisi, a pupil of Marcantonio Raimondi. The work is in three parts: 1° Instructions for barbers wishing to perform bloodletting, with descriptions of the veins that allow bloodletting to be performed with a lancet; 2° Leeches, how to purify them and how to apply them; 3° How to apply suction cups. This first edition is the only one with the artist's name on the title page. The work was reprinted in 1586 and 1588 without the artist's name. A fine copy with the handwritten bookplate of a seventeenth-century surgeon from Lyon, Joann, in the lower margin of the title. De Ville chirurgo Lugdunense, 1629. The spine of the vellum binding has been stained brown and decorated between the nerves with palmettes and small coats of arms with a lion (city of Lyon?), a transformation probably carried out in Lyon when the surgeon Jean De Ville acquired the volume. In the margin of page 31, there is an autograph commentary in Latin by De Ville. Waller 6142 - Durling 2905.