of Padua inform us that he “conducted himself very well in this, his
rigorous examination ... he was approved unanimously.”^23 Amazingly, the
following day, Vesalius was named the chair of surgery and anatomy.
Despite his meanderings through three schools in four years, he had
distinguished himself among his professors, and it was clear that
something special was brewing in Padua.
A day after graduating, in December 1537, the new chair of anatomy
and surgery started his first anatomical dissection, on an eighteen-year-old
male, and the dissection would last for eighteen days. Vesalius would
follow the traditional protocol established by Mondino: abdominal cavity
first, then thorax, head and neck, brain, and then extremities. The greatest
change witnessed by the audience was that Vesalius performed every role:
lecturer, demonstrator, and dissector. The prestigious physician, acting as
surgeon, had dismounted from his cathedra chair and positioned himself,
knife in hand, over the body. He didn’t have to read from Mondino or
Galen, he knew their works verbatim. Just shy of his twenty-third birthday,
Vesalius also introduced a new pedagogical device of posting illustrations,
or charts, for his students. Here was a man who was obsessed with true
knowledge transfer, and within a year he would publish his first book, the
Tabulae Anatomicae. The drawings were nontraditional, reflecting what
Vesalius observed and was trying to convey, with high mnemonic value.
The Tabulae Anatomicae was printed in Venice, with six large woodcut
illustrations of anatomy, measuring 19 by 13½ inches. In this 1538 book,
there are the first hints at Galen’s fallibility. Vesalius discovered
inconsistent findings in Galen’s descriptions, and the young anatomist was
beginning his program of refusing to accept past authority until his own
research proved it to be true.
Two years later, Vesalius published a revised edition of another
anatomist’s book, Johann Guinter’s Institutiones Anatomicae, which would
serve as a text to accompany the lectures and demonstrations in anatomy.
In a sense, much of the book was plagiarized, with Vesalius revising the
work of the primary author, yet adding content throughout. While it seems
odd that Vesalius would publish a revised edition of another author’s work,
worse would happen to Vesalius when his words and illustrations would be
entirely plagiarized verbatim by other publishers.
In the late 1530s, Vesalius began a program of comprehensive analysis
of Galen, with Greek interpretation and scholarly evaluation of his