ABSTRACT
Andreas Vesalius had an unusual hobby—he loved dissecting small animals. Dead squirrels and rabbits were his favorite treasures. Growing up in family of doctors and pharmacists who encouraged his strange hobby, Vesalius was given medical books that diagrammed human and animal anatomies. Vesalius accepted the skinned body and taught the students about the human anatomy. A few days later, the woman's relatives accused Vesalius of stealing her body and experimenting on her. In the 1500s, the Catholic Church frowned on human dissection, but they did allow Vesalius and his students to use the bodies of people who had been hung or beheaded for their crimes. Vesalius began giving public demonstrations of human anatomy and dissection. In 1543, at the age of 29, Vesalius published a new definitive work on the human body. He included more than 200 hand-drawn pictures of the human body.
