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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Andreas Vesalius Biography VESALIUS, ANDREAS (1514-64) . A distinguished anatomist, born at Brussels. He studied classics at Louvain, and medicine at Cologne, Paris, Louvain, and Padua (M.D., 1537) . He lectured on anatomy in Louvain, Venice, Padua (where he was professor in 1537-44), Basel, Pisa, and Bologna. In 1544 he was made physician in chief to Charles V and later to Philip II at Madrid, where he continued mainly to reside. In 1564 he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The story is that he had begun to dissect a body before life was extinct and because of this was prosecuted not only for murder but for impiety and narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Inquisition. Philip II gained a pardon for him on condition that he make the pilgrimage. While in Jerusalem he was invited to Padua to occupy again the chair of anatomy, made vacant by the death of his pupil Fallopius (q.v.). He embarked for Europe; but was shipwrecked on the island of Zante, where he died from exhaustion. Vesalius published: a translation of the ninth book of Rhazes (1537) ; an atlas of six plates, Tabulae Anatomicae (1538; reprinted in facsimile by Sir W. S. Maxwell, London, 1874) ; and his two best-known works, De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (1542) and De Humani. Corporis Fabrica Librorum Epitome (1543) . Possibly these two, and certainly the Tabulae, were illustrated by Jan Stephen van Calcar, a friend of Vesalius and a pupil of Titian. Vesalius proved that Galen (q.v.) described anatomy from dissections of lower anirnals and not of man, and he became the pioneer of comparative anatomy and of race craniology. Fallopius criticized his teacher in his Observationes Anatornicae (1561), to which Vesalius replied in Observationum Fallopii Examen (1561). In 1547 he published Radicis Chinae Usus, the result of his observations of the new remedy China root. The great edition of Vesalius' collected works, with fine plates cut in copper by Jan Wandelaar, was published at Leyden in 1725 under the supervision of Boerhaave and Albinus. It contains also the Chirurgia Magna, wrongly attributed to Vesalius. Consult the lives by Burggraeve (Ghent, 1841); Roth (Berlin, 1892); and J. M. Ball (St. Louis, 1910 ) with reproduction of cuts. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XXIII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 119. |