The_Invention_of_Surgery

To one earnestly concerned with dissection there is nothing in

which they [earlier anatomists] seem to have had less interest

than in the dissection of the human body. They are so firmly

dependent upon I-know-not-what-quality in the writing of

their leader [Galen] that, coupled with the failure of others to

dissect, they have shamefully reduced Galen into brief

compendia and never depart from him—if ever they

understood his meaning—by the breadth of a nail.

Powerful words from the twenty-eight-year-old, but later in the
introduction, he softened:

At present I do not intend to criticize the false teachings of

Galen, easily prince of professors of dissection; much less do

I wish to be considered as disloyal from the start to the author

of all good things and as paying no heed to his authority.^27

In the words of Mark Antony, “I come to bury Caesar not to praise
him.” Vesalius went on to reference over two hundred instances in which
Galen was wrong regarding “human structure and its use and function.”
The message was becoming clear: The king is dead, long live the king.
Earlier in this chapter, mention was made of Ambroise Paré, who some
consider the first great surgeon. An argument can be made that Vesalius is
the luminary that elevated surgery from the lowly barber/surgeons by his
emphasis on the skillful use of the hands. In De fabrica, Vesalius mourned
that man had neglected “that primary instrument, the hand, so that [the
manual aspects of medicine] were relegated to ordinary persons wholly

untrained in the disciplines subserving the art of medicine.”^28 Whereas in
ancient times, the early physicians used the three methods of the regimen
of the diet, the use of drugs, and the use of hands, by degrees physicians of
Vesalius’s time had “promptly degenerated from the earlier physicians,
leaving the method of cooking and all the preparation of the patients’ diet
to nurses, the composition of drugs to apothecaries, and the use of the

hands to the barbers.”^29 Vesalius, wellborn into a proper family, was
making the case for intimate contact with patients, which would require
getting dirty and smelly. Physicians in ancient times “devoted themselves