Vesalius

Vesalius, Andreas (Andreas Vesalius, 1514-64), outstanding anatomist. Vesalius studied medicine in Montpellier and Paris (his teachers were Vidius, Sylvius and Winter von Andernach). By order of Sylvius, V. repeated his lectures before students. Upon returning to his homeland (Belgium), he gave an independent course in anatomy at Louvain, obtaining for demonstration the skeleton of a hanged man. In 1534, he became a physician in the army of Charles V. Three years later, having become famous for his knowledge of anatomy, he received a professorship in Padua and defended his dissertation in Basel. In 1543, he began publishing his famous work: "De humani corporis fabrica", libri septem, Basileae, with illustrations by Titian's student Stephan von Kalkar, whereby the organs were described by Vesalius for the first time in systematic order, and not in the order of dissection, as his predecessors had done. Refuting the authority of Galen, V. was not always fair to him, asserting that Galen's anatomy was "the anatomy of a dog, a monkey", and not of a human. V.'s work was met with a whole storm of hatred and envy (among his opponents was his teacher Sylvius). During V.'s journey with Charles V, in Madrid at court, the hostility toward V. intensified so much that the theological faculty of Salamanca was asked to express its opinion on the permissibility of dissecting human corpses, which was decided in the affirmative. Later, under Philip II, court intrigues and the hostility of the clergy, whose vices V. ridiculed, delivered him into the hands of the Inquisition; V. was forced to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, not intending to return to Spain, as he was invited to occupy the position vacated by Fallopius in Padua. On the return journey, V. suffered shipwreck near the island of Zante; here in 1564, from illness and want, V. died, the brilliant anatomist who first put anatomy on the path of exact experimental research. A statue of V., made by the famous sculptor David, was erected in Brussels. V.'s works were republished in 1725-"Andreas Vesalii opera omnia anatomica et chirurgica, cura Hermanni Boerhaave et Bernhardi Siegfried e Albini", v. I-II, Lngd., 1725.