especially to the treatment of luxations [joint dislocations], fractures,
wounds, and ... freed warriors of javelins, darts, and other evils ... of
war.”^30 Vesalius wanted physicians to still use their hands to treat patients,
“if it please the gods, [to be] like the Greeks, to scorn the whisperings of
those physicians,”^31 who had disdained the art of using the hands to make
dissections and treat patients. While Paré is rightly credited with wiser
treatment of war injuries, and more elegant treatment of severed blood
vessels, Vesalius’s simultaneous reinvigoration of the study of the human
body and exaltation of the use of the hands makes him one of the most
important figures in the history of surgery.
With his anatomical text prepared, final planning was made on the
illustrations. The magnificent drawings commissioned by Vesalius,
transmitted via woodcut blocks onto massive pieces of paper, are
recognizable to most of us. The master artist Titian (1490–1576) was born,
lived, and died in the Republic of Venice. In his many productive years,
Titian maintained a studio in Venice, and it is thought that the superlative
illustrations in De fabrica likely emanated from a young genius in that
studio. The illustrations fall into four general groups: the introductory
illustrations, the muscle men, the historiated initials, and the sublime
anatomical figures. All of the refined artwork would have first been drawn
on paper, and then came the arduous task of converting the drawings into
reverse images on identical-size woodblocks. The woodblocks were made
of pearwood, sawed with the grain, rubbed with hot linseed oil, and then
meticulously carved by the cutters with extreme delicacy. Following
completion of the blocks, Vesalius wrote a letter to the printer in Basel,
Switzerland. He had chosen Johannes Oporinus, a professor of Greek in
Basel, who was well known to scholars for his attention to detail and
extremely high production values. The letter and all the woodblocks
arrived in Basel in September, 1542, following a transalpine cartage from
Venice. Oporinus and his team (along with the help of Vesalius) then spent
months organizing the manuscript and woodcuts, and by the summer of
1543, finished books were emerging. (While most woodblocks used for
printing were recycled or thrown away, the De fabrica blocks survived for
centuries, at times being lost for decades. There were whispers that the
blocks were hidden at the University of Munich library, and after some
investigation, they were discovered in pristine condition in a large trunk in