De l'électricité. De l'électricité du corps humain. De l'électricité des végétaux. De l'électricité des météores

A uniformly bound contemporary set of the Abbé Bertholon’s three major treatises on electricity, in five octavo volumes.

De l’électricité du corps humain dans l’état de santé et de maladie, Paris, Croulbois, and Lyon, Bernuset, 1786, 2 volumes: second edition, considerably enlarged, the first edition of 1780 having appeared in a single volume; 6 folding plates at the end of volume II.

De l’électricité des végétaux, Paris, P. F. Didot jeune, 1783: first edition, illustrated with 3 folding plates and a folding table of plant diseases.

De l’électricité des météores, Lyon, Bernuset, 1787, 2 volumes: first edition, Lyon issue, published in the same year as the Paris issue bearing Croulbois’s imprint; 6 folding plates at the end of volume II.

The fifteen intaglio plates, engraved by L. Legrand, depict an entire arsenal of apparatus, experiments and natural phenomena: devices for electrifying the human body, the electro-vegetometer, waterspouts, the effects of lightning on the sea, volcanoes and more.

Contemporary full speckled tan calf, spines with raised bands and gilt decoration, black calf lettering- and numbering-pieces. A wormhole to the lowest compartment of volume I of the Corps humain, abrasion to the lower board of volume II, and a small loss to the lowest spine compartment of the same volume. Scratches to the lower board of the Végétaux, lettering-piece rubbed. Eight corners bumped. A 1.5 cm worm track in the lower margin of the first fourteen leaves of volume I of the Météores, gradually fading; in volume II, two wormholes in the lower margin from page 300 onwards, developing into two narrow tracks in the final leaves. In volume I of the Corps humain, a broad 2 cm worm track extends to page 50. Internally fresh. A good set.

From one treatise to the next, Bertholon steadily extends the reach of electricity: in the Corps humain, it becomes a possible therapeutic force, applied to disease and even to the periodic attacks of a patient whose condition is observed almost like an atmospheric phenomenon. In the Végétaux, it moves into the garden: the electro-vegetometer is intended to capture electricity from the air and conduct it towards plants in order to stimulate their growth. With the Météores, it rises back into the sky, where Bertholon seeks to explain, through the same fluid, lightning, waterspouts, will-o’-the-wisps and other phenomena that eighteenth-century science was still attempting to reduce to common causes.

This ambition explains the distinctive place he occupied in Enlightenment physics. Born in Lyon in 1741 and a priest of the Congregation of the Mission, Bertholon became professor of experimental physics at Montpellier and one of the most active advocates of electrical research. Nicknamed the “Franklin of Languedoc,” he vigorously promoted the lightning conductor and was called upon as an expert in the celebrated Saint-Omer case, argued before the Conseil d’Artois by the young Robespierre on behalf of Vissery de Bois-Valé.

His taste for practical application appears throughout his work. He devised apparatus, proposed experiments, sought to protect buildings from lightning, crops from disease, and even towns from the effects of earthquakes. Monge would later entrust him with an important part of the first volume of the Dictionnaire de physique for the Encyclopédie méthodique. More a transmitter than an original discoverer, Bertholon gathered, organised and disseminated the electrical knowledge of his time with remarkable effectiveness.

Brought together in this contemporary five-volume set, these works reveal the full scope of his project: to carry electricity from the patient to the plant, from the plant to the storm, and to explain through a single fluid both the disorders of the body and those of the sky.