Andreas Vesalius
Andreas Vesalius founded modern anatomy by dissecting human bodies himself and publishing what he actually saw. Born in Brussels in 1514 into a family of court physicians and apothecaries, he studied at Louvain and then Paris, where teaching followed the classical method: a professor read Galen aloud from a chair while a barber-surgeon cut and a demonstrator pointed. Vesalius did the cutting himself, which was regarded as beneath a physician. He took bodies from the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris and, at Louvain, retrieved a criminal's skeleton from a roadside gibbet. He became professor of surgery at Padua in 1537, at twenty-three, the day after graduating. He made anatomical charts, performed public dissections, and steadily accumulated observations that contradicted Galen, whose authority had stood for thirteen centuries. He realised the reason: Galen had dissected animals, mainly Barbary macaques and pigs, because Roman law forbade human dissection. De humani corporis fabrica, published in Basel in 1543, is one of the most influential books in the history of science, and one of the most beautiful. Its illustrations, from Titian's workshop, show flayed figures standing in landscapes, and were cut with a precision that made them usable as references. He corrected some two hundred of Galen's errors, including the porous septum of the heart and the shape of the human jaw and sternum. The book provoked fierce attacks from Galenists, including his own former teacher, who suggested the human body had changed since antiquity. He left academic life to serve as physician to Charles V and then Philip II. He died in 1564 on the way back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, shipwrecked on Zakynthos.
- Lived: 1514 CE – 1564 CE
- Nationality: Flemish
- Roles: anatomist, physician, scientist
