Vesalius Publishes De Humani Corporis Fabrica — Modern Anatomy
Andreas Vesalius published On the Fabric of the Human Body in 1543 and replaced a thousand years of anatomy taken on authority. Medicine at the time was taught from Galen, a Greek physician of the second century whose work was regarded as complete. A university dissection was a ceremony in which a professor read Galen aloud from a chair while a barber-surgeon cut and a demonstrator pointed, and where the body disagreed with the text the body was assumed to be anomalous. Vesalius, teaching at Padua in his twenties, did the cutting himself. He also obtained material by any means available, including a robbed gibbet outside Louvain, and negotiated with a judge in Padua who timed executions to suit the teaching calendar. The Fabrica is seven books with more than 200 woodcuts of a quality no anatomical work had approached, produced in the circle of Titian and printed in Basel, showing flayed figures standing in landscapes. Its substance was the correction of some 200 points where Galen was wrong — the human jaw is one bone rather than two, the sternum has three parts, there are no pores in the septum of the heart — and its explanation was that Galen had dissected animals, chiefly Barbary apes, and generalised. He was attacked by his own teacher for it and left academic life for the imperial court. He was thirty-one in 1543, the year Copernicus also published. The book's real argument was about method rather than about bones. It asserted that the authority on the human body is the human body, examined directly by the person making the claim, which is the same move Galileo made about the sky seventy years later. Vesalius died in a shipwreck returning from Jerusalem in 1564.
- Year: 1543 CE
- Category: Scientific
