710 william eamon
human body. He criticized Galen on numerous points, although he did
not abandon Galenic theory altogether.
in 1543, Vesalius published his monumental De humanis corporis fabrica
[on the Fabric of the Human Body] (Fig. 19.1). Sumptuously illustrated
with exacting drawings made directly from Vesalius’s own dissections
and published in a folio edition by Johannes oporinus in Basel, De fabrica
was like no other anatomy book ever produced. The dissected cadavers,
set up in idealized classical poses resembling Greek sculptures, display
the organs of the human body with a realism and precision never before
attained.31
although revolution-making, De fabrica was hardly revolutionary.
rather, it fell squarely within the scholarly tradition of renaissance human-
ism. Vesalius was one of the scholars collaborating on the new Giunti edi-
tion of Galen’s oeuvre that appeared in 1541. in the preface to De fabrica,
he bemoaned the decline of medicine since antiquity. in writing his book,
he explained, he wanted anatomy to be “recalled from the region of the
dead,” so that one might “assert without shame that the present science of
anatomy is comparable to that of the ancients and that in our age noth-
ing has been so degraded and then wholly restored as anatomy.”32 While
acknowledging the errors in Galen’s anatomical writings, Vesalius was not
interested in undermining the Galenic medical system. indeed, he upheld
the ancient physician as a model to be emulated.
Vesalius left Padua soon after the publication of De fabrica to become a
personal physician to the Holy roman emperor, charles V. His successors
continued his work and brought the anatomical revolution to fruition.33
realdo colombo (c.1516–59), who succeeded Vesalius as professor of
anatomy, corrected several of Vesalius’s errors in his De re anatomica
(1559), a work that catapulted him to the papal court. Gabriele Fallop-
pio (1523–62) and Girolamo Fabrici (Hieronymus Fabricius of aquapen-
dente, 1533–1619), who in turn succeeded colombo, furthered Vesalius’s
approach, making anatomy a rigorous science distinct from any practical
medical use to which it might be put. Fabricius, in particular, connected
the study of anatomy to natural philosophy, developing a research pro-
gram addressing the aristotelian topics of motion, sensation, digestion,
31 on Vesalius and his book, see c. d. o’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564
(Berkeley/los angeles, 1964).
32 Quoted in o’Malley, Andreas Vesalius, p. 320.
33 cynthia Klestinec, Theaters of Anatomy. Students, Teachers, and Traditions of
Dissection in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore, 2011).