Vesalius was born in Brussels on 31 December 1514, a member of a family with a tradition of medicine - his father was the royal pharmacist to Charles V, the so-called Holy Roman Emperor (actually a German prince). Following in the family tradition, Vesalius went first to the University of Louvain then, in 15 3 3, enrolled to study medicine in Paris. Paris was at the centre of the revival of Galenism, and as well as being taught the works of the master, Vesalius also learned his skill at dissection during his time there. His time in Paris came to an abrupt end in 1536, because of war between France and the Holy Roman Empire (which, as historians are fond of pointing out, was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire; but the name has passed into history), and he returned to Louvain, where he graduated in medicine in 1537. His enthusiasm for dissection and interest in the human body are attested by a well-documented occasion in the autumn of 1536, when he stole a body (or what was left of it) from a gibbet outside Louvain and took it home for study.
By the standards of the day, the medical faculty at Louvain was conservative and backward (certainly compared with Paris), but with the war still going on, Vesalius could not return to France. Instead, soon after he graduated, Vesalius went to Italy, where he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Padua at the end of 1537. This seems to have been merely a formality though, since after being given an initial examination which he passed with flying colours, Vesalius was almost immediately awarded the degree of doctor of medicine and appointed to the faculty at Padua. Vesalius was a popular and successful teacher in the still-new Galenic ‘tradition’. But, unlike Galen, he was also an able and enthusiastic dissector of human beings, and in striking contrast to his grave-robbing activities in Louvain, these researches were aided by the authorities in Padua, notably the judge Marcantonio Contarini, who not only supplied him with the bodies of executed criminals, but sometimes delayed the time of execution to fit in with Vesalius’s schedule and need for fresh bodies. It was this work that soon convinced Vesalius that Galen had had little or no experience of human dissection and encouraged him to prepare his own book on human anatomy.
The whole approach of Vesalius to his subject was, if not exactly revolutionary, a profound step forward from what had gone before. In the Middle Ages, actual dissections, when undertaken at all, would be carried out for demonstration purposes by surgeons, who were regarded as inferior medical practitioners, while the learned professor would lecture on the subject from a safe distance, literally without getting his hands dirty. Vesalius performed his dissection demonstrations himself, while also explaining to his students the significance of what was being uncovered, and thereby raised the status of surgery first at Padua and gradually elsewhere as the practice spread. He also employed superb artists to prepare large diagrams used in his teaching. Six of these drawings were published in 15 3 8 as the Tabulae Anatomica Sex (Six Anatomical Pictures) after one of the demonstration diagrams had been stolen and plagiarized. Three of the six drawings were by Vesalius himself; the other three were by John Stephen of Kalkar, a highly respected pupil of Titian, which gives you some idea of their quality. It is not known for sure, but Stephen was probably also the main illustrator used for the masterwork De Humani Corporis Fabrica (usually known as the Fabrica), published in 1543.
Apart from the accuracy of its description of the human body, the importance of the Fabrica was that it emphasized the need for the professor to do the dirty work himself, instead of delegating the nitty gritty of the subject to an underling. In the same vein, it stressed the importance of accepting the evidence of your own eyes, rather than believing implicitly the words handed down from past generations -the Ancients were not infallible. It took a long time for the study of human anatomy to become fully respectable - there remained a lingering disquiet about the whole business of cutting people up. But the process of establishing that the proper study of man is man, in the wider sense, began with the work of Vesalius and the publication of the Fabrica. The Fabrica was a book for the established experts in medicine, but Vesalius also wanted to reach a wider audience. He produced alongside it a summary for students, the Epitome, which was also published in 1543. But having made this mark on medicine and laid down a marker for the scientific approach in general, Vesalius suddenly abandoned his academic career although still not 30 years old.
He had already been away from Padua for a considerable time in 1542 and 1543 (mostly in Basle) preparing his two books for publication, and although this seems to have been an officially sanctioned leave of absence, he never returned to his post. It is not entirely clear whether he had simply had enough of the criticisms his work had drawn from unreconstructed Galenists, or whether he wanted to practise medicine rather than teach it (or a combination of these factors), but armed with copies of his two books Vesalius approached Charles V and was appointed as court physician - a prestigious post which had one principal disadvantage in that there was no provision for the physician to resign during the lifetime of the Emperor. But Vesalius can hardly have regretted his decision, since when Charles V allowed him to leave his service in 1556 (shortly before Charles abdicated) and granted him a pension, Vesalius promptly took up a similar post with Philip II of Spain, the son of Charles V (the same Philip who later sent the Armada to attack England). This turned out not to be such a good idea. Spanish physicians lacked the competence that Vesalius was used to, and initial hostility to him as a foreigner became exacerbated by the growth of the independence movement in the Netherlands, then ruled by Spain. In 1564, Vesalius obtained permission from Philip to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but this seems to have been an excuse to stop off in Italy and open negotiations with the University of Padua, with a view to taking up his old post there once again. But on his way back from the Holy Land, the ship Vesalius was travelling in encountered severe storms and was delayed sufficiently for supplies to run low, while the passengers also suffered severe seasickness. Vesalius became ill (we don’t know exactly what with) and died on the Greek island of Zante, where the ship ran aground, in October 1564, in his fiftieth year. But although Vesalius himself contributed little directly to the achievements of science after 1543, he had a profound influence through his successors in Padua, which led directly to one of the greatest insights of the seventeenth century, William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood.
~~The Scientists: A History Of Science Told Through The Lives Of Its Greatest Inventors -by- John Gribbin.
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