Vesalius, Andreas

Abstract

Andreas Veaslius is the most renowned of Renaissance anatomists. After several stops and starts to his education, he took his Doctor of Medicine at the University of Padua where he quickly rose to prominence as lecturer of surgery. His university career, though important in inspiring both contemporaries and subsequent generations of anatomists, was relatively brief, lasting from 1537 to 1543. Even before the publication of his widely celebrated De humani corporis fabrica (1543), Vesalius was appointed Imperial physician to Charles V and he achieved some fame as a surgeon. Traditionally described as a major reformer of the field, even one who revolutionized anatomy, Vesalius’s research actually continued some of the innovations of earlier Renaissance anatomists, namely in stressing the importance of dissection and in criticizing Galen. On a deeper level, his approach remained fundamentally Galenic, though he revealed that Galen had relied upon animal dissecting in writing about human anatomy. Vesalius stressed that human anatomy required human dissection, but Vesalius, too, performed animal dissections and comparative anatomy. Although he was invited to return to his academic post and may have wished to do so, he died on the return trip from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1564. His work confirms the close relationship between Renaissance anatomy and natural philosophy (Mandressi 2003; Vesalius 2014).