Andreas Vesalius

“ Another stumblingblock hindering the beginnings of modern medicine and surgery, was the theory regarding the unlawfulness of meddling with the bodies of the dead. The dissection of the human body was prohibited since the injury to the body would prevent its resurrection on the Last Day. Andreas Vesalius was the pioneer in the movement for increased knowledge of anatomy, and in 1543, when his work appeared, he was condemned to death by the Inquisition as a magician. ”

“ He studied medicine under John Baptist Montanus, an eminent physician, and anatomy under the yet more distinguished Andreas Vesalius, in whose house he resided for eight months. On 13 May 1541 he was created M.D. of the university of Padua. On quitting Padua he proceeded on a tour through Italy, and his observations, recorded in the treatise above referred to, on the libraries and the state of learning in Venice, Florence, Urbino, Ferrara, Sienna, Bologna, Pisa, and Rome, though brief, are of considerable interest. At Florence he was the guest of Cosmo de' Medici. ”

“ Vesalius led for many years the life of the rich and successful court physician, but regrets for his past were never wholly extinguished, and in 1561 they were roused afresh by the reading of an anatomical treatise by Gabriel Fallopius, his successor in the chair at Padua. From that moment life in Spain became intolerable to Vesalius, and in 1563 he set out for the East. Tradition reports that this journey was a penance to which the Church condemned him for having opened the body of a woman before she was actually dead ”

“ It is most improbable, if not impossible, that Vesalius, of all men, should have mistaken a living body for a dead one; while it is most probable, on the other hand, that his medical enemies would gladly raise such a calumny against him, when he was no longer in Spain to contradict it. ”

“ After serving for a short time as a surgeon in the army of the Emperor Charles V., Vesalius went to Italy, where he at once attracted the attention of the most learned men, and became, at the age of twenty-two, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Padua. ”

“ The central figure was a man not yet in the prime of life, and justly full of its pride, as you may see from his portrait. Like Aristotle and Hippocrates cradled and nurtured in an AEsculapian family, Vesalius was from his childhood a student of nature, and was now a wandering scholar, far from his Belgian home. But in Italy he had found what neither Louvain nor Paris could give, freedom in his studies and golden opportunities for research in anatomy. ”

“ The cry has been the same in all ages; it is the same which we hear in this age for curbing scientific studies: the cry for what is called "sound learning." Whether standing for Aristotle against Bacon, or for Aquinas against Erasmus, or for Galen against Vesalius, the cry is always for "sound learning": the idea always has been that the older studies are "SAFE."
At twenty-eight years of age Vesalius gave to the world his great work on human anatomy. With it ended the old and began the new; its researches, by their thoroughness, were a triumph of science ”

“ It was the practice of Vesalius, while he was professor in Italy, to issue a public notice the day before each demonstration, stating the time at which it would take place, and inviting all who decried his errors to attend and make their own dissections from his subject, and confound him openly. It does not appear that any one was rash enough ever to accept the challenge; yet, although the majority of the young men were on the side of Vesalius, the older teachers continued to regard him as a heretic, and in 1551 Sylvius published a bitterly personal attack. ”

“ Ruling princes in Italy, visitors of distinction, high ecclesiastics--all wished to have Vesalius's opinion when their cases became puzzling. This is a side of his character that many of his modern biographers have missed. Even Sir Michael Foster, whose knowledge of the history of medicine, and especially of physiology, makes one hesitate to disagree with him, seems not to have appreciated Vesalius's interest in practical medicine. ”

“ Even at that time, the authority of Galen was held in such high respect, that when Vesalius showed his errors, and his ignorance of the structure of the human body, the hatred of all was turned against the defamer. People could not bear to be set right by so young a man, and even his preceptor Sylvius denounced perpetual enmity against him. I need not tell my present auditors what scrapes Vesalius got into, or what injuries he sustained, in consequence of the public prejudice against dissection. ”

“ It is clear, then, that the opposition to Vesalius arose entirely from the conservatism of fellow scientists in medicine, who thought that what had been taught for many hundreds of years in the universities, and had been accepted by men quite as good as Vesalius or any of their generation for over a thousand years, must surely be nearer absolute truth than what this young investigator wished them to accept. ”

“ For religious antipathies as a factor in the persecution of Vesalius, see the biographies by Boerhaave and Albinos, 1725; Burggraeve's Etudes, 1841; also Haeser, Kingsley, and the latest and most thorough of all, Roth, as above. Even Goethals, despite the timidity natural to a city librarian in a town like Brussels, in which clerical power is strong and relentless, feels obliged to confess that there was a certain admixture of religious hatred in the treatment of Vesalius. ”

“ As to the relation of anatomy to theology as regards to Adam's rib, see Roth, pp. 154, 155.
A new weapon was now forged: Vesalius was charged with dissecting a living man, and, either from direct persecution, as the great majority of authors assert, or from indirect influences, as the recent apologists for Philip II admit, he became a wanderer: on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, apparently undertaken to atone for his sin, he was shipwrecked, and in the prime of his life and strength he was lost to the world.
And yet not lost. In this century a great painter has again given him to us. ”

“ Vesalius, says Portal, in the rapturous strain of one devoted to his own science, appears to me one of the greatest men who ever existed. Let the astronomers vaunt their Copernicus, the natural philosophers their Galileo and Torricelli, the mathematicians their Pascal, the geographers their Columbus, I shall always place Vesalius above all their heroes. The first study for man is man. ”

“ After graduating at Louvain in philosophy and philology, Vesalius went to Paris to study medicine. At this time at Paris, Sylvius, after whom one of the most important fissures of the brain, the sylvian, is named, was not only teaching anatomy in a very interesting way, but was also providing opportunities for original research in anatomy in connection with his own investigations. The interest that his teaching excited may be gathered from the fact that over 400 students were in attendance at his lectures. ”

“ Two things favored him—an insatiate desire to see and handle for himself the parts of the human frame, and an opportunity, such as had never before been offered to the teacher, to obtain material for the study of human anatomy. Learned with all the learning of the Grecians and of the Arabians, Vesalius grasped, as no modern before him had done, the cardinal fact that to know the human machine and its working, it is necessary first to know its parts—its fabric. ”

“ When the human mind has adjusted itself, in the course of years, to consider certain beliefs and ideas as settled truths, it comes as a painful shock to be told that these beliefs are erroneous and that new ones must take their places. This is precisely what happened when Vesalius’ book was first published. From one end of Europe to the other there was a very great stir among the well-educated physicians ”

“ He is represented in academic costume, probably that which he wore at lectures, in the act of demonstrating the muscles of the arm. The picture is reduced, and in the reduction loses something of the force of the original. We see a strong, independent, self-willed countenance; what his features lack in refinement they make up in force; not an artistic or poetic face, but the face of the man of action with scholarly training.
His Great Book.—The book of Vesalius laid the foundation of modern biological science. It is more than a landmark in the progress of science—it created an epoch. ”

“ Cunningham, in his Presidential Address to the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1908, refers to the work of Vesalius, whom he describes as one of the most remarkable figures in the sixteenth century. He adds:—
It is interesting to note in passing that certain racial distinctions did not escape the eye of Vesalius. “It appears,” he remarks, “that most nations have something peculiar in the shape of the head. The crania of the Genoese, and, still more remarkable, those of the 16Greeks and Turks, are globular in form. ”

“ There is no such pathetic tragedy in the history of our profession. Before the age of thirty Vesalius had effected a revolution in anatomy; he became the valued physician of the greatest court of Europe; but call no man happy till he is dead! ”

“ Vesalius may rightly be considered the founder of modern anatomy, for he was the first to furnish correct information, based on actual dissections of the human cadaver, respecting quite a large number of the more important anatomical relations; and by this very act he won the further credit of having dealt the first effective blow toward the dethronement of Galen, the man who, next to Hippocrates,—probably even more than Hippocrates,—had exercised, by his teachings in nearly every department of medical science, almost despotic sway over physicians for considerably more than one thousand years. ”

“ To Vesalius belongs the credit of daring to expose the errors of the Galenian system. A Fleming by birth, he early migrated to Venetia, and lectured with immense success at Padua, and afterward at Bologna and Pisa. So prominently does his simple adherence to facts and disregard of tradition and prejudice, exhibit him as superior to the more servile workers in the science of medicine before his time, who were in reality mere commentators on Hippocrates and Galen, that he has been called the father of human anatomy. ”

“ So, too, in Vesalius's time another doctrine of this sort was dominant: it had long been held that Eve, having been made by the Almighty from a rib taken out of Adam's side, there must be one rib fewer on one side of every man than on the other. It was also held upon the authority of Genesis that the Almighty created man literally out of the dust of the earth, and breathed life into his nostrils. ”

“ This view was demonstrated to be untenable by Vesalius, the reformer of anatomy in the sixteenth century and the forerunner of the morphologists of zoology. Other points about the structure of man and animals, equally fantastic, were upheld, and against one who ventured to disbelieve in them the cry of heretic was raised. We may at first sight think that crude misunderstandings are harmless vagaries, but when viewed as to their consequences we see that this class of superstitions has led to intolerance and persecutions. ”

“ In France human dissections were attended with such dangers that the young Vesalius transferred his field of labors to Italy, where such investigations were covertly permitted, if not openly countenanced.
From the very start the young Fleming looked askance at the accepted teachings of the day, and began a series of independent investigations based upon his own observations. The results of these investigations he gave in a treatise on the subject which is regarded as the first comprehensive and systematic work on human anatomy. ”

“ Vesalius actually causing to be drawn and engraved two muscles which he knew were not found in the human subject, because they had been described by Galen, from dissections of the lower animals. Both breaking through old traditions in the search of truth; one, knife in hand, at the risk of life and reputation, the other at the risk of fire and fagot, with that mightier weapon which all the devils could not silence, though they had been thicker than the tiles on the house-tops. ”

“ Be these things as they may—and the exact truth of them will now be never known—Vesalius set out to Jerusalem in the spring of 1564. On his way he visited his old friends at Venice to see about his book against Fallopius. The Venetian republic received the great philosopher with open arms. Fallopius was just dead; and the senate offered their guest the vacant chair of anatomy. ”

“ When Cardan went to study at Pavia in 1519 this tradition was unshaken. It was not until the advent of Vesalius that the doom of the ancient system was [Pg 270] sounded. Then, when Anatomy sprang to the front as the potent ally of Medicine, the science of healing entered upon a fresh stage, but this new force did not make itself felt soon enough to seduce Cardan from the altars of the ancients to the worship of new gods. As long as he lived he was a follower of the great masters, though at the same time his admiration of the teaching of Vesalius was enthusiastic and profound. ”

“ Thus we find the stage set for Vesalius and Paré, who with Hunter, though he entered somewhat later, laid the foundation, which, when anesthesia and antisepsis were added in the nineteenth century, gave surgery its right to claim a scientific basis. Vesalius, occupying a chair of surgery at Padua, developed anatomy as an exact observational science; indeed he may be considered as the founder of modern anatomical research. This was his great work; this and his influence in weakening the old speculative medicine and in establishing the principles of the scientific method. ”