Each decorated letter tells a story relevant to the text: one shows grave robbing for corpses to dissect, another suggests how to boil a body in a cauldron, and yet another how to articulate a skeleton. Vesalius means weasel and it was a name of which the great anatomist was proud.
The illustration for the frontispiece of the Fabrica is topped by a coat of arms bearing three weasels and held aloft by a pair of chubby putti.
The Fabrica and Epitome continue to impress all who see them — and now for the first time they can be viewed online with an accompanying commentary highlighting some of their remarkable features and setting them in historical context. In her book Picturing the book of nature: image, text, and argument in sixteenth-century human anatomy and medical botany University of Chicago Press, Sachiko Kusukawa discusses some of the images that feature in the Fabrica and Epitome.
Inset images: a portrait of Vesalius in ; the multi-layered manikin in the Epitome ; an initial from the Fabrica Cambridge University Library. The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image. Vesalius undertaking a dissection, in the hand-coloured frontispiece to his 'Epitome' Our Horizons email lets you know when the latest issue of the University of Cambridge's research magazine is available for you to read online.
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International students Continuing education Executive and professional education Courses in education. Annual reports Equality and diversity Media relations A global university. Events Public engagement Jobs Give to Cambridge. Research at Cambridge. By identifying "the anatomical errors" present in Galen's book and speech, he challenged the dogmas of the Catholic Church, the academic world and the doctors of his time.
However, the accuracy of his findings and his innovative way to disseminate them among his students and colleagues was essential so that his contributions are considered by many the landmark of modern medicine.
His death is still surrounded by mysteries having different hypotheses, but a certainty, suffered sanctions of the Catholic Church for the spread of their ideas. The cardiologists, cardiovascular surgeons, interventional cardiologists, electrophysiologists and cardiovascular imaginologists must know the legacy of genius Andreas Vesalius that changed the paradigm of human anatomy. The history of medicine is marked by men and scientific discoveries that have transformed how medical pratice is conducted and knowledge of biological phenomena in the human body both in health and in disease, the professor of anatomy and physician Andreas Vesalius was one of these geniuses.
The medieval world was gradually giving rise to a new thinking present in arts, music, literature, science and medicine, where the human body became worshiped, studied and thus better understood its aesthetic, functional and anatomical value. In addition, the observation followed by experimentalism and critical thinking were central to change the way how we search for solutions and see the world. Galen's ideas that influenced for 15 centuries teaching and medical practice were progressively challenged and replaced front of new evidence from the observational method and systematic experimentation.
The story of Vesalius combines a revolutionary approach to anatomy, innovative teaching method through the execution of dissection by the professor of medicine alongside the students and an innovative technique of publication. Those were made possible by the university environment of Padua in the Venetian Renaissance setting and, this way, a testament to the history of medicine of the importance and benefits between science and art, in particular with the publication of his important book "De Humani Corporis Fabrica" becoming certainly the father of modern anatomy.
Besides, due to his ideas ahead of time and the content of his literary works he suffered persecution of religious and political attitude that contributed to his tragic end.
Free will, critical thinking and freedom of expression, which still in the contemporary world faces challenges and threats, in the Renaissance period was through him that we began to consolidate a new paradigm of looking at scientific phenomena - the scientific method. The aim of this review is to present a summary of his career as a physician and anatomist and his important anatomical contributions as a legend of Medicine.
Claudius Galenus, also known as Galen of Pergamum, was one of the most influential Roman physicians of Greek origin, his theories dominated the practice and medical science for over 15 centuries. Galen made important contributions to distinguish veins, arteries and the venous blood from the arterial blood, besides the concept of the brain controlling the body and the role of the kidneys in the urine formation [ 1 , 2 ].
In his treatise "De usu Partium" he expresses his theory about blood circulation. According to his concept venous blood present the function of nourishing the body, as this would be secondary to the absorption of the useful part of the food and its subsequent transformation in the liver, an organ which has key role in maintaining the circulatory system [ 2 ].
This venous blood reaches the heart and lungs, where in addition to the nutrients being consumed, a portion of it would pass through the pores in the interventricular septum and in the process it would get in touch with the pneuma from the lungs and the very center of the innate heat, leading to the formation of the arterial blood which is responsible for distributing the vital heat around the living body. Therefore, according to this view both venous and arterial blood circulate together and were governed by repelling properties by the heart and liver, and the attraction of other body organs [ 2 ].
In many societies, formerly, the dissection was a prohibited act to be performed in human bodies, animals were the only source for some of these, which provided poor anatomical knowledge or misapplication of it by trying to interpret these findings to humans. The first anatomists, properly, probably emerged only in the Hellenistic Alexandria, with Herophilus and Erasistratus, being considered the medical school founders in the region and performed dissections in public.
Herophilus, in particular is considered the father of anatomy, accounting for important descriptions of the structure and functioning of nerves and vessels [ 3 ]. Only in the mid-twelfth century, with the rediscovery of Aristotle's works, it was found that some studies were based on the dissection of animals and vivisection of these, which somehow legitimized the practice at this time, being an important driver to beginning of a new ideology that would allow less restricted execution of human dissection.
Those subject to dissection varied during the historical context, from a private investigation because of a noble death, the ultimate form of humiliation for criminals during public practice, until the Renaissance in which the dissection of bodies is progressively introduced to medical universities and reaches a status of academic importance. The Renaissance had an important scientific milestone to Medicine fostering research on the organizer components of the human body through dissection of cadavers, process which won not only public notoriety due to the associated status, as well as its relation to teaching in universities.
However, even before the descriptions made by Vesalius another important name in human history has contributed significantly to medicine in the field of anatomical research.
Leonardo Da Vinci, and his numerous projects in the areas of math, engineering and aerodynamics, made several anatomical drawings with detail and often his questions with regard to the physiological functioning became the basis for numerous other researchers after him, being one of the inspirations for Vesalius.
Andreas Vesalius was born on December 31, in Brussels, Belgium, being the son of a family of physicians where both his father and his grandfather had served the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
Figure 1. Painting showing Andreas Vesalius in his dissection activity Adapted [ 11 ]. After a study phase in Louvain, where he learned classical languages, went to medical degree in Paris in , where he was student of the first French anatomist Johannes Quinterus of Andernach and Jacobus Sylvius.
The latter was very committed to Galen's ideas, making the study of anatomy frustrating in Paris. The lack of anatomy practical classes at the University of Paris took him in with his peers to visit at night, cemeteries outside the city in search of human bones. This set of difficulties did the young man to return to Louvain in search for completing his studies in medicine [ 4 , 5 ]. In , after completing his bachelor's degree, he sought the University of Padua to perform his doctorate, since it was the birthplace of Renaissance science and provided the best opportunity to advance his studies in the anatomy area.
At 23, after completing his doctorate, he was appointed Professor of Surgery at the University of Padua, which at that time was also linked to the teaching of anatomy [ 4 - 6 ]. As a teacher promoted a major change in the teaching of anatomy by assuming the role of dissecting the corpses instead of assistants and barbers, common practice in major medical universities in Europe, making his lessons increasingly attractive to his students and colleagues.
He liked to communicate directly with his pupils and never as an authority figure, but as someone that encourages them to examine, to perform experiments and to judge for themselves. The second major innovation promoted by the teacher Vesalius was the development of anatomical drawings with didactic purpose and six of them were published as the Tabulae Sex, with the help of artist Jan Stefan van Kalkar, a disciple of the great Italian Renaissance painter Titian.
It can be said that the academic life contributed to instigate the constant search for knowledge of Vesalius as can be seen in one of his notes after students request that he prepare a draft of the venous circulation "that claim proved to be so pleasurable for doctors and students that they strongly encouraged me to describe the arteries and nerves" [ 4 - 7 ].
Vesalius was gradually becoming a more critical observer and, in his "Letter of Venesection," he abandons his beliefs in traditional and authorized teachings emanated from the influence of Galen, who built a human anatomy extrapolated from the dissection of animals, especially chimpanzees, and incorporates the principle that scientific knowledge should be based solely by the facts derived from observation.
Vesalius was now able make repeated and comparative dissections of humans. This was in marked contrast to Galen, the standard authority on anatomy who, for religious reasons, had been restricted to animals, mainly apes. Vesalius realised that Galen's and his own observations differed, and that humans do not share the same anatomy as apes.
The book was based largely on human dissection, and transformed anatomy into a subject that relied on observations taken directly from human dissections. Vesalius now left anatomical research to take up medical practice. Maintaining the tradition of imperial service, he became physician to the imperial court of Emperor Charles V and in took service with Charles' son, Philip II of Spain.
In , he left for a trip to the Holy Land but died on 15 October on the Greek island of Zakynthos during the journey home. Search term:. Read more.
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