The project of writing De humani corporis fabrica, hereafter referred to
as De fabrica, began in earnest in early 1540, just after his twenty-fifth
birthday. Vesalius intended for De fabrica to be a guide for dissection and
to understand the human body. This was not simply a book about the body
that could be read by a gentleman in isolation. This was an instruction
manual for physicians (a later condensed book, Epitome, was intended for
medical students), with step-by-step descriptions (and pictures) of the
tools needed for dissection, the technique for boiling and cleaning bones,
and the dissection process for each muscle, joint, organ, and nerve. He
would sometimes spend weeks by himself in his Paduan home, writing and
reflecting. Vesalius probably spent at least a year writing the text for De
fabrica. His earliest publication had woodcut prints of drawings from his
own hand, but in the end all the illustrations in De fabrica were drawn by
professional artists. The printing revolution had given Vesalius and his
team of illustrators the power of multiplication when all his predecessors
were writing “one-off” books whose text had to be scribed by hand but
whose drawings, redrawn one at a time, rapidly denigrated in quality with
successive reproductions.
Vesalius, in his earlier works, had hinted at Galen’s inconsistencies and
the problem of his lack of human dissection. In De fabrica, there was no
more hinting and only slight nuance regarding the master. In the
introduction of De fabrica, Vesalius affirmed:
At Padua, in that most famous university of the whole world
... I gave lectures on surgical medicine, and because anatomy
is related to this, I devoted myself to the investigation of
man’s structure. Thus I have already conducted anatomy very
often here and in Bologna, and, discarding the ridiculous
fashion of the schools, I demonstrated and taught in such a
way that there was nothing in my procedure that varied from
the tradition of the ancients.He then referenced the gods of anatomy, including Galen, and then
criticized their followers: