Anatomy

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Anatomy

During the Renaissance, medical scholars made great advances in understanding the structure of the human body. Throughout the Middle Ages, physicians had relied on the theories of ancient thinkers to explain how the body worked. Renaissance students of anatomy took a new approach, focusing on firsthand observation. Still, their work was not completely revolutionary. Although they made new discoveries, they did not challenge the basic theories of the ancient Greeks.

Changing Views of Anatomy. During the Middle Ages, there was a sharp distinction between the fields of medicine and surgery. Doctors treated disease, while surgeons tended to wounds and broken bones. Most people saw medicine, which required book learning, as a more advanced skill than surgery. Anatomy was held in low regard because it was the responsibility of surgeons. This view changed during the Renaissance. New methods and discoveries led to a belief that anatomy was essential to the study of medicine.

The practice of dissection—cutting open bodies to examine their inner parts—plays a key role in anatomy. In the 1100s and 1200s, medical scholars studied anatomy by dissecting pigs. By the end of the 1200s, they were dissecting human bodies. In 1316 Mondino dei Liuzzi, a professor of medicine at the University of Bologna, wrote the first complete study of human anatomy. His book, Anatomy, became the basis for anatomical studies in European universities in the 1300s and 1400s.

During the Middle Ages, the study of anatomy was a matter of learning the different parts of the body. In the 1500s, however, students of anatomy began to perform their own studies of the body. By seeking firsthand knowledge, they followed in the footsteps of the ancient Greek physician Galen. Galen's view of anatomical research was based on autopsia, a Greek word meaning "seeing for oneself." Galen's treatise* On Anatomical Procedures was discovered and translated from the Greek in 1531.

Renaissance medical scholars also linked anatomy with philosophy and theology*. They pointed to the human body as an example of God's marvelous workmanship. The new view of anatomy had a great impact on medicine. By the late 1500s, students at the University of Padua were claiming that anatomy was the very foundation of medicine.

Anatomy also came to play an important role in art. Renaissance artists emphasized a natural, lifelike style, similar to that of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. They turned to anatomy to help them portray the human form more accurately. The paintings and drawings of Raphael, Albrecht DÜrer, and Michelangelo Buonarroti show these artists' understanding of anatomy. Leonardo da Vinci even sought out corpses to dissect. His knowledge of anatomy enabled him to draw specific body parts, such as the hand and shoulder, in very realistic detail.

Major Discoveries. The most important anatomist of the Renaissance was Andreas Vesalius. In the 1530s he began to find fault with Galen's theories of anatomy because Galen had dissected animals rather than humans. Vesalius decided to recheck Galen's work using human corpses. He ended up completely rewriting human anatomy in a massive and brilliantly illustrated work, On the Structure of the Human Body (1543). Vesalius and later anatomists contradicted Galen on a number of details, such as the structure of the liver. However, they did not challenge Galen's ideas about how the body worked.

Some anatomists tried to outdo Vesalius by creating even more precise anatomies of the body. Others made detailed studies of specific parts of the body, such as the ear and the kidney. Some parts of the body take their names from the Italian anatomists of the 1500s who discovered them. For example, the eustachian tube, between the nose and the ear, is named for Bartolomeo Eustachi.

However, the most important new development after Vesalius was comparative anatomy. This discipline involved studying the anatomy of various life-forms, including humans, and comparing their body structures. Girolamo Fabrici da Aquapendente, an anatomist at the University of Padua, was the first to study comparative anatomy in detail. He hoped to publish a complete comparison of all animal life-forms. He never finished this work, but he did publish parts of it in the early 1600s.

The last great achievement of Renaissance anatomy was the discovery of the circulation of the blood. Galen had believed that the body produced new blood in the liver and used it up as it was needed. In the early 1600s, English anatomist William Harvey concluded that the heart circulates blood continuously throughout the body. He reached this conclusion by calculating how much blood the heart pumped in a given time. He realized that if the blood did not move in a circle, the body would burst. Harvey published his findings in 1628. Although he made his medical discoveries through observation and logic, he continued to believe that there must be philosophical explanations behind them.

(See alsoMedicine; Science. )