Andreas Vesalius

Dates: 1514–1564
Period: Renaissance period

Andreas Vesalius was a physician from Brussels who taught anatomy at Padua and, at 28, published De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, the 7 books on the fabric of the human body. Johannes Oporinus printed it at Basel in 1543. The text runs to about 350,000 words, and its woodcuts show skeletons, flayed muscle figures and detailed anatomical plates.¹

His greatest attainment was to set the anatomist's own hands and eyes above the authority of books. He dissected human bodies himself, confirmed and refuted many of Galen's teachings, and wrote in his preface that Galen “never dissected a human body, but in fact was deceived by his monkeys.”²

Zevism reads the Fabrica as light carried into the darkness inside the body. The work belongs to Athena, who rules craft and wisdom, and to Apollo and Asclepius, whose art of healing depends on knowing the body truly.

LIFE AND CONTEXT

Vesalius was born in Brussels in December 1514 into a family of prominent physicians from Wesel in the Duchy of Cleves. He studied medicine at Paris, where he trained on “a few dissections of animals” under Jacob Sylvius, a teacher he called “famous and never sufficiently praised.”³

Friends and instructors urged him to conduct “a better than usual public dissection.” War drove him back to Louvain, where, he wrote, “for the last eighteen years the doctors there had not even dreamt of Anatomy.” His demonstrations there set the younger professors to work on the parts of the body, “understanding clearly what an extraordinary instrument of philosophy this knowledge provides them.”⁴

In 1537 he moved to Padua as professor of anatomy. When he wrote his preface he'd been lecturing there for 5 years “under a stipend from the illustrious Senate of Venice,” which he called “by far the most generous in its support of higher learning.” Of his work at Padua he said simply: “I plied this task while inquiring into the structure of man.”⁵

The Fabrica appeared in 1543, and in the same year Charles V called him to court as physician. He travelled from Brussels and Basel to Madrid and the court of Philip II of Spain. He didn't leave the book alone: for the 1555 edition he made “thousands of purely stylistic as well as substantive changes.”⁶

In 1564 he set out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and died on Zante, the Greek island of Zakynthos. The date is reported differently: the National Library of Medicine gives 15 October 1564, Britannica June 1564.⁷

ATTAINMENTS

• He published the Fabrica in 7 books: bones and ligaments; ligaments and muscles; veins and arteries; nerves; the organs of nutrition and generation; the heart and its organs; the brain and the organs of sense.⁸
• He finished the whole at 28, a text of about 350,000 words.⁹
• He did his own dissections and observed the body in detail, “confirming and refuting many of Galen's anatomical and physiological tenets.”¹⁰
• He changed how anatomy was taught, showing Galen's errors in public anatomies and “insisting that medical students test the facts of human anatomy with their own hands and eyes.”¹¹
• He produced a shorter companion, the Epitome, printed from the same set of engraved wood blocks sent to Basel, and paid for the plates himself.¹²
• He was court physician to the emperor Charles V from 1543 and later went to the court of Philip II of Spain.¹⁰

KEY STORIES

Barbers and Jackdaws

In his preface to Charles V, Vesalius described how anatomy had been taught. “Physicians did not undertake surgery, while those to whom the manual craft was entrusted were too uneducated to understand what professors of dissection had written.” The professors, he wrote, “in their egregious conceit squawk like jackdaws from their lofty professorial chairs things they have never done but only memorize from the books of others.”¹³

The men with the knives fared no better. They were “so ignorant of languages that they are unable to explain dissections to an audience and they butcher the things they are meant to demonstrate.” His verdict on the whole show: “Fewer things are placed before the spectators in all that confusion than a butcher in a market could teach a doctor.”⁴

He'd seen it as a student. The Fabrica, he said, “would never have gone forward if when I was studying medicine at Paris I had not personally set my hand to Anatomy.” He and his fellow students had to be content with “a few internal parts being superficially displayed at one or two public dissections by the most ignorant barbers.”⁴

Deceived by His Monkeys

The same preface treats Galen with honour. Vesalius calls him “the first man of medicine after Hippocrates” and recalls how Galen boasted that “the medical care of the Pergamene gladiators was entrusted to him alone,” and how he “frequently repeats how much he enjoyed working with his hands.” He even arranged his own 7 books in the order Galen had recommended.⁴

Then he named the problem. The doctors of his day had so trusted Galen “that no doctor has been found who believes he has ever discovered even the slightest error in all the anatomical volumes of Galen.” Yet the reborn art of dissection, the careful reading of Galen's own books and the restoration of many portions of them showed “that he himself never dissected a human body, but in fact was deceived by his monkeys (granted a couple of dried-up human cadavers came his way).”⁴

He knew what such a claim would cost a young man. “At the same time it does not escape me how little authority this effort of mine will have on account of my age, as I have not yet passed beyond my twenty-eighth year.” He published anyway.⁴ In Zevist terms he returned to the source: the body itself, and Galen's own text read with care.

Woodblocks for Basel

The pictures had to travel from Venice to a printer in Basel. Vesalius sent them with a letter signed at Venice on 9 September: “You will soon receive with this letter, by way of Milanese merchants, the Danoni, the wood blocks engraved for my books De humani corporis fabrica and their Epitome.”¹⁴

He named his helpers, “the meticulous engraver” and “Nicolaus Stopius, the trustworthy business agent of the Bombergs here, a young man with a first-class humanistic education.” He wanted the printing to keep the fine work of the cutting, “the thickness of the lines in certain parts, which is the most artful feature of these illustrations and thoroughly delightful for me to view.”¹²

He'd paid for the blocks himself. “This is the chief reason why I prepared the plates at my own expense, and now again and again beg you that they be preserved by your workmen as undamaged and clean as possible.”¹⁵

A Skeleton Contemplating a Skull

The book that came off Oporinus's press opens on a scene. Its title page shows “Vesalius performing a dissection in a crowded anatomical theatre.” A few pages on, his portrait has him standing, face to the front, “holding the arm of a dissected corpse.”¹⁶

The skeletons act like living men. On page 163 one stands in full length, “leaning against a shovel with its right arm.” On page 164 another, seen from the side, is “contemplating a skull.” On page 165 a 3rd stands “leaning on its hands.” The flayed muscle men follow from page 170.¹⁷

The National Library of Medicine warns against crediting all these pictures to 1 artist. Jan Stephan Calkar is credited with the portrait, and the wider group is known as the workshop of Titian.¹⁰

THE ZEVIST READING

The Temple teaches that unexplored darkness isn't evil. It's the ground one walks into with a lamp, and explored darkness becomes Light, which is knowledge. The inside of the human body was that kind of darkness for a professor reading from his chair. Vesalius opened it with his own hands and had it cut into wood so that every reader could see what he'd seen. He called that knowledge “an extraordinary instrument of philosophy,” and Zevism agrees: it's Σοφία reached through the hand and the eye.

Zevism also holds that knowledge evolves in transmission while the source keeps priority. Vesalius kept Galen in view: he praised him, followed his order of books and read his text closely, then checked every claim against the body the Gods made. Galen stands in the same chain of healers, and Vesalius corrected him from the body, the source both men had studied.

The Fabrica was built by many hands: the anatomist, the engraver, Stopius the agent, the Milanese carriers and the printer at Basel. Athena presides over that kind of shared craft, and Asclepius and Apollo over the healing it serves. The Hippocratic physician swore by “Apollo the physician, and Asclepius, and Hygieia and Panacea and all the gods.”¹⁸

Vesalius was a Christian and died during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The Temple's reading is its own: to know the body truly is part of ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν, becoming like the divine as far as possible, because the Gods see what is and a true anatomy teaches a human being to do the same.¹⁹