Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica

In a typical anatomy lesson of the early 1500s, the professor sat on a high chair or stood at a podium and read aloud from Galen while a barber surgeon cut into the body and students watched. Dissections were rare and rarely close. Galen had worked mostly from apes, dogs and sheep, and his mistakes about the human body usually went unnoticed or were written off as oddities.

Andreas Vesalius, born in Brussels in 1514, became a professor at Padua in 1537 and began to do his own dissections. He had been a firm follower of Galen and helped prepare a new Latin translation of Galen's works in the early 1540s, but the bodies on his table disagreed with the text. The human liver had two lobes, not five. Galen's description of the processes of the lumbar vertebrae was wrong. The rete mirabilis, a net of blood vessels that Galen had seen in the necks of sheep, did not exist at the base of the human brain.

Johannes Oporinus printed De humani corporis fabrica in Basel in 1543, in seven books. Vesalius described the body structure by structure and backed each description with what he had found in human cadavers. The illustrations were the work of several artists. Jan Stephan Calkar is credited with the portrait of Vesalius, and the other artists are known only as the workshop of Titian. Vesalius also brought out a shorter dissection manual, the Epitome, using many of the same blocks. The same year, Charles V called him to court as a physician.

Galen's defenders fought back. Jacques Dubois, called Sylvius, who had taught Vesalius in Paris, attacked him in a pamphlet in 1551. Fear of more criticism led Vesalius to hold back from new research, and he burned several manuscripts for other books. Copyists were quicker still. Juan Valverde de Amusco's Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano, printed in Rome in 1556, was among the best known of the books that reused the images and text of De fabrica.

Vesalius died far from Padua. Recalled to an honored chair there while on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he was shipwrecked on the Greek island of Zante on the way back and died on 15 October 1564.