Andreas Vesalius, the Reformer of Anatomy

by James Moores Ball

INTRODUCTION

The intelligent student of medical history has at his command an unfailing source of pleasure. To learn the successive steps by which Medicine has advanced from a priest-ridden and secret art practiced with mysterious rites in the Greek temples, passing through the schools of Greek philosophy into the light of publicity, is his privilege. To hunt through musty and worm-eaten volumes for facts regarding the great physicians of antiquity is his delight; and to communicate the knowledge thus obtained to others, who have not the time or the facilities for such research, is his duty. In every period are events and incidents of interest, but to the Middle Ages a peculiar fascination attaches; for it was during this period that Europe, emerging from an intellectual darkness of ten centuries’ duration, awoke to the Renaissance, and Medicine, as ever has been the case, kept pace with the general advance of knowledge.

The present book deals with the life of a master whose work was an essential factor in the evolution of the Anatomical Renaissance. In order to understand the New Birth of Anatomy it is necessary to know something of the scope and influence of the General Renaissance.

The General Renaissance

This, the Revival of Learning, includes an indefinite time in European history. The seeds of the new movement were planted in the Middle Ages, but they bore no fruit until the time had arrived for an apparently “spontaneous outburst of intelligence”. Definitions of the Renaissance will vary with the point of view. Artists and sculptors will say it was a revolution which was created by the recovery of ancient statues; littérateurs and philosophers look upon it as a radical change due to the discovery of the writings of the classical authors; astronomers and physicists will cite the names of Copernicus, Galileo, and Torricelli; geographers will point to the discovery of a New Continent; historians will name the extinction of feudalism and the capture of Constantinople by the Turks; inventors will recall the changed conditions of warfare brought about by gunpowder, the multiplication of books by the invention of printing, and the advent of new methods of engraving; and anatomists will sound the praises of Leonardo da Vinci and of Andreas Vesalius. All will agree that the Renaissance meant Revolution—revolution in thought, in conduct, in creed, and in conditions of existence. To no one fact can the Renaissance be attributed; nor can its scope be limited to any one field of human endeavor. The Renaissance was, and is, and will continue to be, as long as the race progresses.

The new movement began in Italy and grew rapidly. When, toward the end of the sixteenth century, the lamp of learning began to get dim in Italy, it was relighted by the nations of northern Europe—the Germans, the Hollanders, and the English—and by them was transferred to us. The Revival consisted largely in the recovery of the buried writings of the ancient Greek and Roman authors, together with comments on what they had written, and the production of books which were modeled after their works. But it was broader than this. It included all branches of learning, although more progress was made in some lines than in others.

Italy, a country divided into numerous small States, and so-called Republics, offered great opportunities for individual development and became famous in those paths in which individualism has gained its greatest triumphs. Thus in literature, in law, in medicine, in painting and in sculpture, the Italians were preëminent. In architecture and in the drama they reached no such heights as were attained by the French, the Germans and the English. It was in the northwest part of Italy, in the province of Tuscany, that the Renaissance gained its greatest victories. Among the earliest of the leaders of the New Learning was the Florentine poet, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). “To Dante”, says Symonds, “in a truer sense than to any other poet, belongs the double glory of immortalising in verse the centuries behind him, while he inaugurated the new age”. His Vita Nuova (New Life) and Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy) are essentially modern in thought, but ancient in the manner in which the thought is expressed.

Petrarch may be said to fairly open the new era. Like Dante, he was a Florentine. He was the apostle of Humanism, that system of philosophy which regarded man “as a rational being apart from theological determinations” and perceived that “classic literature alone displayed human nature in the plenitude of intellectual and moral freedom”. To a revolt against the despotism of the Church, it added the attempt to unify all that had been taught and done by man. Petrarch was a poet, a lawyer, an orator, a priest, and a philosopher. He lived between the years 1304-1374. He was a great traveler, and visited the leading continental cities in order to converse with learned men. Petrarch delighted in the study of Cicero, in collecting manuscripts, and in accumulating coins and inscriptions for historic purposes. He advocated public libraries and preached the duty of preserving ancient monuments. He opposed the physicians and astrologers of his day, and ridiculed the followers of Averröes.

Boccaccio, who has been called the Father of Italian Prose, and is most widely known as the author of the Decameron, did not spend all of his time in describing the escapades of the knights and ladies of old. Influenced potently by Petrarch, Boccaccio regretted the years he had wasted in law and trade, when he should have been reading the classics. Late in life he began the study of Greek that he might read the Iliad and the Odyssey. What he lacked in genuine scholarship he made up in industry. He continued the work begun by Petrarch of hunting for lost manuscripts of the ancient Greek and Roman authors. Many of these precious documents were stored in the conventual libraries, where, too often, they were either wantonly destroyed or were mutilated, the words of the author being erased from the parchment to make way for new prayers. Boccaccio tells of a visit which he made to the Benedictine Monastery of Monte Cassino near the city of Salernum. He wished to see the books and found them in a room without door or key. Many of them were mutilated. On making inquiry as to the cause, the monks answered that they had sold some of the sheets, having first erased the original words, replacing them with psalters. The margins of the old pages were made into charms and were sold to women.