In some respects, the surgeon / doctor / anatomist Andreas Vesalius, surgeon / doctor / anatomist of the Renaissance era, was like modern academics. He favored new research, rejecting attitudes at the time prevalent towards the human body in medical science. His work in anatomy would have done a successful curriculum vitae for a permanence position. And despite his best efforts, his students did not give a damn about his highly qualified conferences.
Vesalius, perhaps better known today for the influential – and unusually large, with seven volumes – The balance of the human body seven (“From the structure of the human body”, 1543), is the central figure of the new book of Sachiko Kusukawa to Label of Sachiko Kusukawa Andreas Vesalius: anatomy and the world of books (2024). The author reshaves our objective beyond Works'S Mixed mixed critical reception and generational influence towards creative scientific approaches from Vésale and the printing practices of books in the 16th century.
Vesalius was very ingenious: unlike his contemporaries, he exercised a considerable agency during the design and publication of his books. He compiled his analyzes of persons executed by suspending or decapiting Works Alongside illuminative drawings executed from three angles by classic formed artists. Indeed, Vesalius marketed the volume as a double: a practical manual to draw the human body and a scientific resource to identify the organs and the musculature. Many of Works'Attractive designs of skeletons strangely positioned with veins and salient skulls are reproduced in this title, including a strange transverse cut of a stretched uterus merged with an enlarged penis.
But Anatomy and the world of books Also shows that it was not always easy for Vesalius. Although he was president of the surgery of the famous University of Padua, the scientist found himself in public theaters which gives lessons to boring and noisy students who could not follow his dissections. Dead dogs had to replace human bodies in these dissections because it was complicated to demonstrate corpses whose high fat content obstructed the organs of sight. Above all, to a censorship of contemporary criticism, Vesalius refuted the widely accepted affirmations of Greco-Roman doctors of the second century like Galen, who propagated the theory of the Four moods. Vesalius may have burned his notes on Galen with frustration in the face of the disapproving response, but the spectacular publications that survive reinforced his reputation as a pioneer of modern Western anatomy.
Andreas Vesalius: anatomy and the world of books (2024) by Sachiko Kusukawa and published by Books reaction is available for online purchase and bookstores.
