Lot 189: DRAPER, John William (1811-1882). [Great Sympathetic Nerve]. Quarter-plate daguerreotype, 2¾ X 2¼ inches, in contemporary leather case. Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, mid-19th century.

DRAPER, John William (1811-1882). [Great Sympathetic Nerve]. Quarter-plate daguerreotype, 2¾ X 2¼ inches, in contemporary leather case. Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, mid-19th century.

Draper's daguerreotype is a photographic reproduction of an anatomical image by Jean Baptiste François Leveillé (1769-1829) that Draper later used as the basis for a woodcut of the great sympathetic nerve reproduced on p. 348 in his treatise on Human Physiology (New York, 1856). The image is probably among the first uses of photography to copy an anatomical image. Draper, a physician and professor of chemistry and physiology, was among the first to use Daguerre's process in America, and he also improved upon Daguerre's process. He is credited with taking some of the earliest photographic portraits known, as early as 1839. Draper also made the first photographs of the moon (1839-40). His Human Physiology was the first American book with medical illustrations from photographs, of which this image is one example. Burns, Early Medical Photography in America (1983) pp. 943, 1264.