The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [68]
Andreas Vesalius, born in Belgium in 1514, entered medical school at age nineteen. Fortuitously, this was right at the time when Galen’s entire oeuvre was being printed in its original Greek for the first time. Up until this point, students had been studying Galenism through translations of translations. Now it was as though a long-neglected masterpiece were restored to its original brilliance—at least, that’s how most scholars viewed the new Galen. But not Vesalius. Fluent in classical Greek and able to read Galen’s actual words, Vesalius saw the cracks and began making notes. The first threads of the Fabrica took form.
Andreas Vesalius
In the years following medical school, Vesalius gradually gained experience in dissecting corpses, something Galen had never been able to do, as dissection was forbidden in ancient Greek society. Vesalius attended autopsies and also managed to obtain bodies of executed criminals and unclaimed corpses for his own private study. In this respect, he was very much like Leonardo, though the world would not have to wait long to learn his thoughts.
Like Henry Gray, Vesalius became a professor of surgery and anatomy (at the University of Padua, Italy) and, in his every spare moment, devoted himself to writing. He spent two years on the first edition of the Fabrica, which he completed in 1542. Deliberately aiming for a lofty tone befitting a scholarly work, he wrote in a highly refined form of Latin. While I unfortunately would not know high Latin from low, I find myself enjoying the text for its visual aesthetics alone. Each page is exquisitely designed and composed. And the woodcut illustrations, still celebrated for their fidelity to human anatomy, are extraordinary. Well over four hundred fill the book. Some are as small as thumbnails (including one of a thumbnail); others are elaborate two-page foldouts with detailed keys.
As with Gray, it is often assumed that Vesalius was his own artist when in fact he worked closely with an illustrator (uncredited, though most likely it was the Flemish artist Jan Stefan van Kalkar) and served as art director, to use a modern term. Nowhere is Vesalius’s hand more evident than in the many drawings of full-length figures. In spite of how extensive each dissection may be, each figure is depicted in an active, lifelike pose. One skeleton looks like a musician playing an invisible saxophone; another, as if he’s taken a break from orating to show off his abdominal viscera. With these startling images, Vesalius was attempting to humanize what many considered an inhuman practice, to show that anatomy is a science of the living body. As distinctive as the poses are the settings. The figures are often standing atop a mountain plateau, a kind of Vesalian Valhalla, in my view. Here again, Vesalius was making a powerful point visually—literally elevating the cadaver, the source of anatomical truth.
Illustration from the Fabrica by Andreas Vesalius
Deliberately mirroring the structure of Galen’s works on anatomy, Vesalius divided the Fabrica into seven “books,” or sections. But instead of paying homage, he systematically laid out all of Galen’s errors and corrected them one by one. No, the human liver does not have five lobes but two. (Galen had counted five in a dog and concluded people must also have that number.) No, arteries do not originate in the liver but in the heart. And no, once and for all, animal anatomy is not the same as human. Vesalius’s brazenness infuriated old-school anatomists, including teachers who had once been his mentors,