A Bio Bibliography Of Andreas Vesalius

The current work provides bibliographic information, a worldwide census, ownership records, and a description of the annotations in all the copies of Vesalius’ Fabrica. It reconstructs the travels of the Fabrica across the globe since 1543 and its annotated readership.

A revisionist biography of Andreas Vesalius—the father of modern anatomy—as deeply shaped by Renaissance culture. In 1543 the young and ambitious physician Andreas Vesalius published one of the most famous books in the history of medicine, On the Fabric of the Human Body. While we often think of dissection as destroying the body, Vesalius believed that it helped him understand how to construct the human body. In this book, Sachiko Kusukawa shows how Vesalius’s publication emerged from the interplay of Renaissance art, printing technology, and classical tradition. She challenges the conventional view of Vesalius as a proto-modern, anti-authoritarian father of anatomy through a more nuanced account of how Vesalius exploited cultural and technological developments to create a big and beautiful book that propelled him into imperial circles and secured his enduring fame.

Andreas Vesalius 1514-1564 By Stephen N. Joffe, M.D. Vesalius was the foremost pioneer of modern anatomy. Born in Brussels, he came from a family of physicians. Educated in Louvain, he studied medicine in Montpelier and Paris, returning to Louvain to teach anatomy. In 1535 he went to France to be an army surgeon to King Charles V and two years later became a professor of anatomy in Padua, Italy. Subsequently he became a physician to the court of Philip II of Spain. On a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he received a call to return to Padua to occupy chair of Fallopius. In a storm leading to a shipwreck and subsequent death on the Isle of Zante, Vesalius was buried there in an unmarked grave in 1564. This marked the end of the ‘prince of anatomy.’ Vesalius’ book De Humani Corporus Fabrica published in Basel in 1543, contributes one of the greatest treasures of western civilization and culture. With its companion volume the Epitome, began the modern observational science and research.

The life of Vesalius, the foremost pioneer of modern anatomy, has never before been told in full. the present definitive biography, published in 1964 to mark the four-hundredth ear since Vesalius's death, fills a serious gap in medical history. It is, in fact, the first biography of the great anatomist since Moritz Roth's work of 1892. Much new information has come to light in the intervening seventy years which enables O'Malley to reassess Vesalius in relation to his eminent contemporaries and to re-evaluate his contributions to anatomy and to medical science in general. O'Malley gives a detailed account of Vesalius's studies of anatomy in Paris, Padua, Pisa, and Bologna, and is thus able to show the comparative advancement of medical knowledge throughout Europe during the sixteenth century. In addition, the book contains a wealth of historical material of broad interest, including an account of the attempt of Vesalius and Ambroise Pare to save the life of Henry II of France as he lay dying form a lance wound in the eye. Also included is a critical account of the various stories concerning Vesalius's persecution by the Inquisition and his subsequent pilgrimage to Jerusalem. As much as possible of Vesalius's major achievement, De humani corporis fabrica (1543), his epochal treatise on the structure of the human body, is presented in his own words, translated from the Latin text by Dr. O'Malley. Wherever feasible, in fact, an effort has been made by the author to tell the story through the precise words of Vesalius or those of his contemporaries. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.

Picturing Punishment examines representations of criminal bodies as they moved in, through, and out of publicly accessible spaces in the city during punishment rituals in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Once put to death, the criminal cadaver did not come to rest. Its movement through public spaces indicated the potent afterlife of the deviant body, especially its ability to transform civic life. Focusing on material culture associated with key sites of punishment, Anuradha Gobin argues that the circulation of visual media related to criminal punishments was a particularly effective means of generating discourse and formulating public opinion, especially regarding the efficacy of civic authority. Certain types of objects related to criminal punishments served a key role in asserting republican ideals and demonstrating the ability of officials to maintain order and control. Conversely, the circulation of other types of images, such as inexpensive paintings and prints, had the potential to subvert official messages. As Gobin shows, visual culture thus facilitated a space in which potentially dissenting positions could be formulated while also bringing together seemingly disparate groups of people in a quest for new knowledge. Combining a diverse array of sources including architecture, paintings, prints, anatomical illustrations, and preserved body parts, Picturing Punishment demonstrates how the criminal corpse was reactivated, reanimated, and in many ways reintegrated into society.