overwhelmed by earlier authorities, either Galenic or Moslem [sic]”^17 and
put considerable trust in his own vision of the human body and its
function. Importantly, he had a sincere interest in art, even owning
Raphael’s John the Baptist. Commentaria would be the first anatomy book
to integrate (although crudely) text and illustration, and Berengario was
the “first anatomist to have a fairly good idea of the true significance of
anatomical illustration.”^18
Although surgery was still limited to the lancing of boils and
rudimentary battlefield triage and temporization, the tide was swelling for
an improved understanding of how the body works. With the advent of the
printing press, the refinement of woodcut printmaking, and a new,
scientific approach to investigation, the stage was set for a young
anatomist/surgeon who would write one of the greatest books ever written.
Andreas Vesalius was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1514, to a family
well positioned in society, with a father (Andries) who was the imperial
pharmacist and a grandfather who was a physician to the Archduke
Maximilian. In a time when royalty was often on the move, the
ambulations of the imperial train compelled Andreas’s father rarely to be
home. Andreas benefitted from an elite education, first in Brussels, and
then as an adolescent in nearby Louvain. At the Castle School at the
University of Louvain, the teenage Vesalius studied philosophy, including
Aristotle, and the arts, and was thoroughly versed in Hebrew, Greek, and
Latin. With a family tradition of medical studies, it is not surprising that
he opted for medical school, and by 1533, Vesalius was on his way to
Paris.
Vesalius enrolled in the medical school in Paris, with the expectation
that he would earn his degree within four years. In retrospect, it seems
amazing that a medical baccalaureate degree demanded four academic
years’ work. A modern surgeon asks, what were they studying and how did
the program take so long? There was no such thing as a microscope, the
concepts of physiology (the study of the dynamic functions of the body),
pathology (the study of diseases of the organs and cells), and microbiology
(the study of bacteria and viruses) were completely undiscovered, and
surgery was as primitive as we may find in a stone age village in Borneo
today. We must conjecture that they learned Galenic and Hellenistic
medicine, replete with philosophy and misinformation. Vesalius was in