8 Human Anatomy
In 1537 Vesalius graduated and moved to the University of Padua (Italy), where he began a long series of lectures—each centered on actual dissections and tissue experiments.
Students and other professors flocked to his classes, fascinated by his skill and by the new
reality he uncovered—muscles, arteries, nerves, veins, and even thin structures of the
human brain.
This series culminated in January 1540, with a lecture he presented to a packed theater
in Bologna, Italy. Like all other medical students, Versalius had been trained to believe in
Galen’s work. However, Vesalius had long been troubled because so many of his dissections revealed actual structures that differed from Galen’s descriptions.
In this lecture, for the first time in public, Vesalius revealed his evidence to discredit
Galen and to show that Galen’s descriptions of curved human thighbones, heart chambers,
segmented breast bones, etc., better matched the anatomy of apes than humans. In his lecture, Vesalius detailed more than 200 discrepancies between actual human anatomy and
Galen’s descriptions. Time after time, Vesalius showed that what every doctor and surgeon
in Europe relied on fit better with apes, dogs, and sheep than the human body. Galen, and
every medical text based on his work, were wrong.
Vesalius stunned the local medical community with this lecture. Then he secluded
himself for three years preparing his detailed anatomy book. He used master artists to draw
what he dissected—blood vessels, nerves, bones, organs, muscles, tendons, and brain.
Vesalius completed and published his magnificent anatomy book in 1543. When medical professors (who had taught and believed in Galen their entire lives) received Vesalius’s
book with skepticism and doubt, Vesalius flew into a rage and burned all of his notes and
studies in a great bonfire, swearing that he would never again cut into human tissue.
Luckily for us, his published book survived and became the standard anatomy text for
over 300 years.
Fun Facts: The average human brain weighs three pounds and contains
100 billion brain cells that connect with each other through 500 trillion
dendrites! No wonder it was hard for Vesalius to see individual neurons.
More to Explore
O’Malley, C. Andreas Vesalius of Brussels. Novato, CA: Jeremy Norman Co., 1997.
Persaud, T. Early History of Human Anatomy: From Antiquity to the Beginning of the
Modern Era. London: Charles C. Thomas Publishers, 1995.
Saunders, J. The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels. New
York: Dover, 1993.
Srebnik, Herbert. Concepts in Anatomy. New York: Springer, 2002.
Tarshis, Jerome. Andreas Vesalius: Father of Modern Anatomy. New York: Dial
Press, 1999.
Vesalius, Andreas. On the Fabric of the Human Body. Novato, CA: Jeremy Norman,
1998.