ABSTRACT
We now turn to the most famous of all sixteenth-century anatomists, Vesalius (Andreas Van Wesele, 1514-1564). Vesalius represents a further stage in the revival of Galen's anatomy in that he taught the world to see a different Galenic body; and he taught anatomists, physicians and philosophers to adopt a new ambition with respect to the Ancients of anatomy. Hitherto the achievement of Vesalius has been judged by historians to be the creation or introduction of 'scientific' anatomy (or of 'modern' anatomy, or of introducing 'the scientific principle' into anatomy), and it has been taken for granted that this necessarily and laudably involved the repudiation of Galen and all he stood for; to become modern and scientific, anatomy (in the historians' eyes) had to be 'liberated' from the authority of Galen, and to be based on experience and observation. The historians of Vesalius have then read back this 'achievement' into his intentions. That is to say it has been implicit or explicit in virtually all earlier accounts of Vesalius (at least all those that I know about), that he set out to repudiate, correct, or replace Galen.1 We shall, however, find his achievement (and also his intentions) to have been quite otherwise. It will be necessary to bear in mind that although Vesalius produced the largest and most beautiful and faithful illustrations of the dissected human body yet seen, and in this sense can be seen as associated with the Renaissance in the visual arts, yet he was not the first to think visually about the body nor the first to put illustrations of it into print: a number of his contemporaries were engaged in doing just this. The novelty of what Vesalius did lay elsewhere. To appreciate what it was we need to trace his activity in the frantic years of his twenties.
