De homine figuris et latinitate donatus a Florentio Schuyl.

Descartes considered the human body a material machine, directed by a rational soul located in the pineal body. This book was the first attempt to cover the whole field of “animal physiology”. The work is really a physiological appendix to his Discourse on method, 1637. The first edition was translated from the French. The French text first appeared in 1664. It was translated, with commentary by T. S. Hall, and published in Cambridge, Mass., in 1972 as Treatise of man. See G.A. Lindeboom, Descartes and medicine, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1979.