Andreas Vesalius

1514-1564

Belgian Anatomist, Physician, and Surgeon

Andreas Vesalius revolutionized the study of anatomy, contributed immeasurably toward making medicine a rigorous empirical science, and wrote one of the most important books in medical history.

Andries van Wesel is generally known by the Latin form of his name, Andreas Vesalius. He was born in Brussels and destined to serve the Holy Roman Emperors. His great-great-grandfather, Peter Witing, was physician to Emperor Frederick III; his great-grandfather, Johannes Witing van Wesele (d. 1476), was physician to Frederick and Archduke Maximilian; his grandfather, Everart van Wesele (d. c. 1485), was physician to Maximilian; and his father, Andries van Wesele (c. 1479-1527), was apothecary to Emperor Maximilian I (the former Archduke) and Emperor Charles V. Frederick granted to Johannes a coat of arms with three weasels. This device is commonly seen in representations of Vesalius.

Vesalius received a Catholic education in Brussels, probably at the School of the Brothers of the Common Life, from about 1520 until 1529, when he entered the University of Louvain. He studied there until 1533, then at the University of Paris until 1536. He received his M.B. from Louvain and his M.D. from the University of Padua, Italy, both in 1537. From 1537 to 1544 he taught surgery and anatomy at Padua. In 1537 he published his paraphrase of nine books of the Arabic physician Rhazes (c. 854-c. 925) and in 1539 his first Epistola (The Venesection Letter).

When Vesalius was a student the dominant medical system in Western Europe derived from the Greek physician Galen (c. 130-c. 200). Vesalius had no reason to question Galen until, while at Paris, he began his lifelong habit of doing all his own dissections. The more he saw with his own eyes the less he believed in the anatomical textbooks. He became preoccupied with anatomical science, and even stole a corpse from a gibbet in Louvain in 1536. By 1540 he recognized that many fundamental Galenic presentations of human anatomy were wrong.

At Padua he hired artists to prepare accurate anatomical charts for his students. His first original publication, Tabulae anatomicae sex (Six anatomical charts) appeared in 1538. The illustrations were done by the Flemish artist Jan Stephan van Calcar (1499-1546?), a student of Titian (1488?-1576).

In 1540 at the University of Bologna, Vesalius publicly announced that Galenic anatomy was not human anatomy, but the anatomy of apes, pigs, and dogs transposed into human form. He had already proved this assertion to his own satisfaction, but to demonstrate it to the world, he began to prepare his monumental work, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Seven books on the structure of the human body), and an outline version to be published simultaneously, Suorum de humani corporis fabrica librorum epitome (Epitome of his books on the structure of the human body). Both appeared in 1543. Vesalius visited Titian's studio in Venice in 1542 and Calcar probably did most of the illustrations for both the Fabrica and the Epitome.

Vesalius personally gave the uniquely colored dedication copy of the Fabrica to Charles V in Mainz, Germany, in 1543. Charles was impressed enough to appoint Vesalius his household physician. Vesalius abruptly abandoned the study of anatomy to become an imperial courtier, but remained active in other areas of medical research. In 1546 he published his second Epistola (The China Root Letter), about syphilis. He published a definitive edition of the Fabrica in 1555, but his primacy as an anatomist was usurped in his lifetime by his student Gabriele Falloppio (1523-1562).

In 1544 he married Anne van Hamme. Thereafter he spent his life mostly traveling with the emperor throughout Europe, sometimes as a military surgeon. When Charles V abdicated in 1556, he created Vesalius Count Palatine with a pension. With Ambroise Paré (c. 1509-1590), Vesalius attended the dying French King Henri II in 1559. The same year he moved to Madrid as court physician to Spanish King Philip II. He died on the Greek island of Zacynthus while returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Vesalius inaugurated an important subgenre of medical publications: "artistic anatomy." His Fabrica and the hundreds of books that followed it in this subgenre are renowned not only for their scientific accuracy, but also for their beauty and power as aesthetic objects.

ERIC V.D. LUFT