Andreas Vesalius

1514-1564

Anatomist

Sources

Influence. Andreas Vesalius is best known today as the founder of modern medical anatomy, on account of his technique, his challenge to receive ideas about the structure of the human body, and his innovative design for an anatomical textbook. His volume initiated a revolution in how anatomy was taught in the late-Renaissance and early-modern curriculum. Yet, if one can place him among the pioneers of modern anatomy, he is perhaps better regarded as the last and best of the ancient anatomists and taken as a measure of the success of medical humanism in sixteenth-century Europe.

Education. Vesalius was born in Brussels, Belgium, which was then a part of the Holy Roman Empire. His father was an apothecary in service to the emperor, Charles V. Vesalius mastered Latin in Brussels and then enrolled at the University of Louvain in 1530, where he must have made the acquaintance of Gerardus Mercator, who was also beginning his studies at that time. Vesalius studied philosophy and liberal arts in the arts faculty, as did all beginning students, but soon turned his attention to medicine. At that time medical education was not as advanced in the north European universities as at Paris, Montpellier, and the schools of Spain and northern Italy, and Vesalius traveled to Paris. In Paris he studied under Jacobus Sylvius and Johannes Guinter of Andernach, two prominent humanist medical scholars, physicians, and teachers.

Dissections. The humanist movement began in art and literature in Italy in the late fourteenth century, as scholars turned their attention away from the scholastic method and medieval sensibilities and instead emphasized participation in human affairs, the study of history, and the recovery of ancient artistic, architectural, and intellectual forms. The method applied to the latter involved the search for and careful assessment of manuscripts written in the ancient languages. Initially, humanists were enthusiastic about the poetry, prose, dramaturgy, and design of ancient Greece and Rome, but by the early sixteenth century, humanism had become a widespread intellectual movement and embraced other subjects as well, including medicine. New attention was brought to bear on the medical writings of Galen and Cornelius Celsus, whose Ciceronian-era Latin prose provided a model for Renaissance medical treatises. Some of Galen’s treatises, such as On the Use of the Parts, were known and translated already in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but were long and complicated and therefore were only slowly incorporated into learned medicine. This treatise and other tracts in which Galen discussed human anatomy aroused the interest of surgery students and anatomists in the fourteenth century and contributed to the dissection manuals that guided students of anatomy through the annual human and animal dissections that the better medical schools required students to attend. Galen had been an avid dissector of animals and his descriptions of human anatomy and physiology led medieval readers to suppose that he had dissected humans as well—which he surely would have, had not the mores of the Imperial Greco-Roman culture discouraged him. Princes and city councils of medieval Europe, eager to facilitate surgical training, authorized the annual anatomical demonstrations and provided some bodies of executed criminals for this purpose. Before Vesalius, such demonstrations served to illustrate what was described in the texts rather than to encourage research and verification of traditional knowledge, and often the actual dissection would be undertaken by a surgeon or other paid sector, who would dissect the body as the professor of anatomy read the appropriate section of a surgical text. This process was how anatomy was taught when Vesalius was a student, but he soon discovered the virtue of firsthand experience, practice, repetition, and close attention to anatomical detail.

Surgical Lectures. During the fifteenth century, On anatomical procedures, Galen’s primary presentation of how dissection should be performed, was translated and published and served to invigorate interest among humanist physicians in anatomical method. Vesalius’s teacher, Johannes Guinter of Andernach, used it as a basis for his own Institutiones anatomicæ (Anatomical Institutions, 1536) and sought to replicate Galen’s methods. Vesalius must have been an avid student, since Guinter spoke well of him in this treatise. Vesalius was forced to leave Paris in 1536 on account of war between France and the Holy Roman Empire, and he returned to Louvain, where he received a bachelor’s degree in medicine in 1537. That same year he headed for Padua in northern Italy, where he enrolled, took his examination, and was awarded the M.D. in one semester. Such was his expertise that he was immediately appointed to a surgical lectureship and began giving the annual dissections, which he performed himself as he lectured—breaking with the usual tradition. To facilitate his teaching, Vesalius produced six anatomical charts in 1538. These proved immediately popular, and he quickly published them to forestall plagiarism and secure his reputation. Vesalius also edited and published an augmented version of Guinter’s Anatomical Institutions, in which he first pointed out in print several of the shortcomings of Galen’s observations.

Popular Teacher. Vesalius was popular as a teacher and was reappointed in 1539 with an increase in salary. The following year he accepted an invitation from the students at the University of Bologna to hold a series of lectures and demonstrations there in tandem with lectures on Galenic anatomy given by Professor Curtius. During the course of these lectures Vesalius realized that anatomical knowledge must be based on firsthand observation rather than dependence on Galen’s writings, which contained many errors that reflected his reliance on animal specimens.

God’s Handiwork. When Vesalius returned to his lectureship at Padua, he began to compose De humani corporis fabrica (On the Architecture of the Human Body), which he published in Basel, Switzerland, in 1543. The title of the book is often rendered literally, On the Fabric of the Human Body, but the Latin wotd fabrica clearly refers to a design that is fabricated by a maker or craftsman (a faber), and therefore ought to be conceived in the sixteenth-century Christian context, where Creation immediately implied Creator. Thus, fabrica is better translated here as architecture to reflect Vesalius’s opinion that study of human anatomy was a form of appreciation of the Creator’s handiwork. In this way he followed Galen, who, though not at all a Christian, viewed anatomy as a kind of appreciation and worship of the divinity and intelligence that he considered to be manifest in all nature and foremost in the human body.

Classic Text. Vesalius went to considerable expense and effort, hiring artisans from the foremost shops in Venice to supply the ample illustrations in his book, which set a new standard both for the quality of anatomical illustration and for medical pedagogy. Vesalius keyed the parts of the body in these illustrations to their descriptions in the text, carefully linking prose explanation to pictorial representation. The result was an enormously sought-after and widely emulated book that is among the most valuable in medical history collections today.

Royal Service. Following the publication of his book, Vesalius took a position as Imperial Physician to Emperor Charles V, who had previously employed his father. In this job he also worked as a military surgeon and learned techniques being practiced on the battlefield—always a source of surgical innovation. After Charles abdicated the throne to his brother Ferdinand, Vesalius entered the service of Charles’s son, the future emperor Philip II, and moved to the new imperial court in Spain. He remained there until 1564, when he embarked on a trip to the Holy Land. The return voyage was troubled by storms, and Vesalius was put ashore on a Greek island, where he died.

Medical Humanist. In retrospect, Vesalius must be seen as a medical humanist, whose mission was to restore the art and science of anatomy to the level of expertise evident in Galen’s works. His approach to anatomy was wholly within the Galenic tradition, as was his understanding of human biology and medicine. However, in the process of reviving Galen’s methods, which included a forgotten technique that enabled the chest of a live pig or other animal to be opened without collapsing the lungs and killing it, he observed and noted several instances in which Galen had erred. As a result of his direct anatomical experiences, and perhaps in keeping with the methodological teachings of Aristotle, which specified that knowledge of general structures was acquired through repeated observations of individual examples, Vesalius stressed that anatomy must be experienced firsthand. Both of these traditions led William Harvey, who studied at Padua at the end of the century, to break with Galen’s understanding of human physiology and discover the true operation of the heart and the circulation of the blood through the body.

Sources

Baldasar Heseler, Andreas Vesalius’ First Public Anatomy at Bologna, 1540: An Eyewitness Report, translated by Ruben Eriksson (Uppsala, Sweden: Almquist & Wiksel, 1959).

G. A. Lindeboom, Andreas Vesalius and His Opus Magnum: A Biographical Sketch and an Introduction to the Fabrica (Nieuwendijk: De Forel, 1975).

Charles Donald O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels 1514-1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964).