Nicolas Andry

[3] In his 30s he studied medicine at Reims and Paris, receiving his degree in 1697, and in 1701 he was appointed to the faculty of the Collège de France and the editorial board of the Journal des savants.

Unlike Leeuwenhoek, Andry's purpose is specifically medical, and his experiments with the microscope led him to believe that the microorganisms he called "worms" were responsible for smallpox and other diseases.

"[7] Though Andry recognizes the importance of sperm to reproduction, however, he addresses their workings primarily in the context of parasitology, and essentially considers spermatozoa to be a unique species of parasitic worm.

"[11] Though the book was read and cited extensively in the period, its main lasting influence in medicine has been its title, which became the name of the field devoted to skeletal and related injuries and ailments (later modified to "orthopædics" and "orthopaedics" or, in American spelling, "orthopedics").

[12] Outside of medicine, the principal impact of the book derives from the engraving on the frontispiece, which shows a straight stake tied to a crooked sapling, a metaphor for the correction of deformities in children.

It is included, without comment, as the last in a series of ten eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrations in Michel Foucault's influential study of the history of correction, Discipline and Punish.

[14] Scholar Paolo Palladino has explained Foucault's use of the image as showing that "practices as disparate as orthopedics and horticulture were increasingly predicated on operative principles that focused on the manipulation of these different life forms' presumed common material substance.