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1555

VESALIUS, ANDREAS. De humani corporis fabrica libri septum. Basil: Joannem Oporinum, 1555.

Andreas Vesalius was born in Brussels in 1514 and at an early age was sent to the University of Louvain where he studied ancient languages. He studied medicine at Montpelier and Paris, and then returned to Louvain, where he began to teach anatomy. The chief task of his life was to revolutionize the teaching of the anatomy of the human body and to overthrow the then prevailing teachings of Galen, who had based his work only upon animal dissection.

Vesalius' anatomy, the Fabrica, published when the author was only twenty-nine, is the foundation of modern medicine. The Fabrica is a beautiful book containing 23 full-page woodcuts, about 180 illustrations in the text, and dozens of charming historiated initials. The first edition was published in 1543 and a second in 1555. The 1555 edition is considered by scholars to be the more interesting of the two because it contains important corrections and additions. Among the alterations is the denial of the permeability of the septum of the heart, thus contributing very substantially to the ultimate discovery of the circulation of the blood.

A few years after the publication of the Fabrica, Vesalius was appointed chief physician to Charles V of Spain, a position he held for twenty years. Vesalius drowned in 1564 in a shipwreck in the Ionian Sea, near the Isle of Zante, while returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Woodcut illustration of the dissecting instruments used by Vesalius, from his Fabrica.