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Vesalius & the Study of Anatomy | ||
Once Vesalius was appointed Professor of Surgery at Padua University he set about changing the way anatomy was studied. At that time, anatomy teaching involved the teacher reading from a book while assistants dissected the body to support the Galenic ideas being read out. Galen, though, had stressed the importance of examination and observation. Vesalius was a Galenist. He wanted to see for himself how the anatomy of a human body worked. In 1539 Vesalius was given access to the bodies of executed criminals by a local judge and he began to regularly perform dissections, many of them as public demonstrations. Originally he had accepted Galen’s ideas but he soon realised that Galen had made mistakes. By dissecting both human bodies and dead animals Vesalius showed that Galen had based his human anatomy on the anatomies of monkeys, cows, pigs and dogs. Though Vesalius still included inaccuracies in his anatomical work, he corrected many of Galen’s mistakes. More importantly he changed the emphasis in medical teaching. Instead of relying on the writings of the past, Vesalius stressed the importance of observation in the pursuit of understanding. He believed that only by carrying out dissections personally could doctors understand how a body worked. He also put anatomy at the forefront of medical study. Vesalius’ work typified Renaissance thinking. He looked back to Classical learning by using Galenic methods of examination and observation to challenge and correct ideas and beliefs that people held to be true. Use the information on this page to answer the following questions:
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This illustration of a medical lecture comes from a medical book printed in 1544. On the left is the professor of medicine seated at a lectern. He reads to the students from his text book whilst a surgeon actually carries out the dissection of the body. Vesalius challenged this method of teaching, insisting that a professor could only fully understand the workings of a body by carrying out the dissections himself.
This is the frontispiece of Vesalius’ book On the Fabric of the Human Body. It is an exaggerated representation of one of Vesalius’ public dissections. It is unlikely that a skeleton would have attended, though, as the picture shows, there certainly would have been plenty of people. Vesalius himself is carrying out the dissection with the body opened for everybody to peer in.
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