Preface

Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (1514–1564) is the most famous of all anatomists, and his De humani corporis fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body), published at Basle in 1543 by Johannes Oporinus, a treasured possession of many libraries. ¹ Man and book deserve their pre-eminence, as contemporaries recognised even before the actual publication of the Fab-rica. ² Vesalius’ emphasis on the need for doctors to dissect and to understand the structures and workings of the body as the very foundation of medicine had earlier been a fundamental demand of the ancient Greek doctor, Galen of Pergamum, ca. 129–ca. 216, but Vesalius went far beyond his great predecessor in the accuracy and depth of his descriptions. His book is also one of the masterpieces of printing, a work of beauty as well as science that resolves for the first time most of the difficulties inherent in the task of depicting three-dimensional structures on a two-dimensional page. Throughout, Vesalius set new standards, creating a dialogue between the verbal content of his exposition and the visual depiction of the body in his plates. Although recent scholarship has shown how much he employed a variety of rhetorical devices to obscure his debts to his predecessors, and not least Galen himself, the Fabrica became within a few years the touch-stone of modern anatomy and the subject ever since of innumerable books, articles, and even novels. ³