Valuable Books, Manuscripts and Photographs, including Highlights from The Royal Society of Medicine

Sale Overview

Christie’s Valuable Books, Manuscripts and Photographs, including Highlights from The Royal Society of Medicine auction in London features a curated selection of works that illuminate the extraordinary history of medicine, science, cartography, literature, religion and philosophy. At the heart of the sale is a group of 100 books, manuscripts and photographs from the library of The Royal Society of Medicine.

Chief among the highlights is William Harvey’s Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (1628, estimate: £800,000–1,200,000), the groundbreaking first description of blood circulation — a publication that transformed medical knowledge and practice. Other notable lots from the library include James Parkinson’s An Essay on the Shaking Palsy (1817, estimate: £50,000–70,000), the exceptionally rare first edition of a foundational work on the neurological disease that would later bear his name, as well as a group of 18 autograph letters (estimate: £50,000–70,000) by the ‘father of immunology’, Edward Jenner, who coined the term ‘vaccine’ to describe his technique of inoculating against smallpox.

The highlight among the medieval and Renaissance manuscripts is an exceptional 10th-century Gospel book likely produced by the female scriptorium at Essen Abbey (estimate: £700,000–1,000,000). Manuscripts from the collection of Phyllis Goodhart Gordan (1913–1994) include English chronicler Ranulf Higden’s medieval bestselling world history, the Polychronicon, previously in the Duke of Newcastle’s library at Clumber Park (estimate: £50,000–70,000); monastic staples in contemporary bindings from the Abbeys of St Maximin in Trier, St Jakob in Mainz, Neustift and Melk; and texts by Ovid, Cicero, Statius, Plato and Lucan. A further highlight among the illuminated manuscripts is the Cromer Book of Hours, a long-lost addition to the famous Aspremont Hours, a gift of love from Henry VIII’s physician, Walter Cromer, to his wife Alice (estimate: £100,000–150,000).

Auction times

10 Dec 12:00 PM (GMT) Lots 1-213

Our specialist’s selection

Brought to you by

Mark Wiltshire

Specialist | Books & Manuscripts

mwiltshire@christies.com

Mark has over a decade’s experience in rare books and has been responsible for important sales in the fields of science, fiction, and science fiction, having set the record price for a work by a female scientist (Ada Lovelace’s Sketch of the Analytical Engine; £212,500), and overseen successful auctions including First Editions, Second Thoughts: An Auction in Support of English PEN (July 2022), Charlie Watts: Gentleman, Collector, Rolling Stone (September 2023), and Science Fiction and Fantasy (December 2024). In private sales, he has sold works by writers including Jane Austen, Victor Hugo, and Robert Burns, as well as several fine and inscribed copies of the first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. He was a co-curator of the Loan and Private Selling exhibition The Art of Literature in 2022, which brought together masterpieces like Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623), T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), and pictures by artists including Rubens and Picasso. Mark holds degrees from the Universities of York and Oxford, where he specialised in the works of the Romantic poets, and has lectured on the life and poetry of his beloved John Keats.