Human Anatomy
Year of Discovery: 1543
What Is It? The first scientific, accurate guide to human anatomy.
Who Discovered It? Andreas Vesalius
Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?
The human anatomy references used by doctors through the year A.D. 1500 were
actually based mostly on animal studies, more myth and error than truth. Andreas
Vesalius was the first to insist on dissections, on exact physiological experiment and direct observation—scientific methods—to create his anatomy guides. His were the first
reliable, accurate books on the structure and workings of the human body.
Versalius’s work demolished the long-held reliance on the 1,500-year-old anatomical
work by the early Greek, Galen, and marked a permanent turning point for medicine. For
the first time, actual anatomical fact replaced conjecture as the basis for medical profession.
How Was It Discovered?
Andreas Vesalius was born in Brussels in 1515. His father, a doctor in the royal court,
had collected an exceptional medical library. Young Vesalius poured over each volume and
showed immense curiosity about the functioning of living things. He often caught and dissected small animals and insects.
At age 18 Vesalius traveled to Paris to study medicine. Physical dissection of animal or
human bodies was not a common part of accepted medical study. If a dissection had to be
performed, professors lectured while a barber did the actual cutting. Anatomy was taught
from the drawings and translated texts of Galen, a Greek doctor whose texts were written in
50 B.C.
Vesalius was quickly recognized as brilliant but arrogant and argumentative. During
the second dissection he attended, Vesalius snatched the knife from the barber and demonstrated both his skill at dissection and his knowledge of anatomy, to the amazement of all in
attendance.
As a medical student, Vesalius became a ringleader, luring his fellow students to raid
the boneyards of Paris for skeletons to study and graveyards for bodies to dissect. Vesalius
regularly braved vicious guard dogs and the gruesome stench of Paris’s mound of
Monfaucon (where the bodies of executed criminals were dumped) just to get his hands on
freshly killed bodies to study.
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