VESALIUS THE HUMANIST

The De Fabrica is composed in Latin. Hardly any scientist of the sixteenth century would have presented his findings in the vernacular. But Vesalius renounced the Latin that was spoken and written by scholars of his time; he purified the common stock of words; he abandoned the simple colloquial prose style, the logical sequence of thought characteristic of the scientific literature of that period. Instead, Vesalius reintroduced the terminology of a time long past. He adopted a stately rhythmical style, a rhetorical word order, in short, he imitated the periodic Latin, the Kunstprosa or “artistic prose” of Cicero, and he was the first anatomist to do so.

The Classical Latin style in which Vesalius ventured to formulate his findings made it rather difficult for the average physician of his day to understand the content of the De Fabrica. Many a contemporary reader must have wondered why Vesalius took this risk; he must have found it meaningless if not counterproductive, that the great anatomist should have labored to veil his empirical investigations in the garb of so artificial a language. Yet Vesalius believed that by recovering true and correct speech the road was paved for the recovery of true and correct knowledge. Thus, the resurrection of anatomy could only occur hand in hand with the rebirth of the Classics.

However revolutionary Vesalius’ achievement may seem to the modern historian, for him it was only the revival of the work of ancient anatomists. Anatomy, according to Vesalius, “should be recalled from the dead, so that if it did not achieve with us a greater perfection that at any other place or time among the old teachers of anatomy, it might at least reach such a point that one could with confidence assert that our modern science of anatomy was equal to that of old, and that in this age anatomy was unique both in the level to which it had sunk and in the completeness of its subsequent restoration” (De Fabrica, praefatio, 3r, ll.22ff).

And he rejoices because “there is no ground for hope that anatomy will ere long be cultivated in all our academies as it was of old in Alexandria” (De Fabrica, praefatio, 3v, ll.30ff.). The slogan of the humanist school of which Vesalius was a part was: “The truth was long since found, and has united noble spirits, do but grasp the ancient truth”. Once the Greeks had been in possession of the truth; now truth and perfection were reborn, they came to light again. This is the way in which Humanists viewed the contemporary development of art and literature during the Renaissance. Vesalius extended this humanism to include anatomy. He knew from Cicero and Celsus that the ancients had dissected human bodies; he learned from Galen that Alexandria had been the center of anatomical research. Modern anatomy was indeed the resurrection of ancient anatomy.

The images shown here are details taken from the frontispiece of the 1555 edition of De Fabrica in all probability designed by Johannes Stephan van Calcar, a pupil of Titian. The plate exerted enormous influence because this plate, besides being a good work of art, also illustrated a striking scientific manifestation. Thus this woodcut became one of the renowned medical prints. It shows how Vesalius went to work at his lectures on anatomy. The bearded figure of the anatomist stands in the middle beside the dissecting table, surrounded by a crowd, about 70 strong, of students and spectators of all ages, while he himself is performing the autopsy on the cadaver of a woman. The detailed treatment of the skeleton in the middle is allusive to Vesalius’ habit of using a skeleton to illustrate his lectures.

It is noteworthy that neither Asclepius nor his rod-and-serpent is depicted in the frontispiece of the De Fabrica. Although Vesalius believed modern anatomy was the resurrection of Classical anatomy, he considered himself a scientific “progressive” and was not particularly enamored of the magical, miraculous cures of Asclepius’ cult and felt no need of a medical symbol the origin and meaning of which he must have considered dubious.