Andreas Vesalius
Anatomy and the World of Books
A revisionist biography of Andreas Vesalius — the father of modern anatomy — as deeply shaped by Renaissance culture.
In 1543 the young and ambitious physician Andreas Vesalius published one of the most famous books in the history of medicine, On the Fabric of the Human Body. While we often think of dissection as destroying the body, Vesalius believed that it helped him understand how to construct the human body.
In this book, Sachiko Kusukawa shows how Vesalius's publication emerged from the interplay of Renaissance art, printing technology, and classical tradition. She challenges the conventional view of Vesalius as a proto-modern, anti-authoritarian father of anatomy through a more nuanced account of how Vesalius exploited cultural and technological developments to create a big and beautiful book that propelled him into imperial circles and secured his enduring fame.
'Kusukawa’s vivid reconstruction of the making of Vesalius's Fabrica takes us deep inside the world of anatomical demonstrations, hospital postmortems, criminal executions, university lecture halls, humanist libraries and artistic and printing workshops. She explains how Vesalius thought about books, images and bodies, and his skill at instructing Renaissance readers how to look, touch, dissect and model the human body in order to learn from it. There is no better introduction to Vesalius.' - Paula Findlen, Stanford University
'In this brilliant digestion of her earlier work, Kusukawa not only reconstructs ‘the making’ of Andreas Vesalius’s masterpiece, Fabrica (and the book’s reception and afterlife), but the making of the man himself. The ‘founder’ of modern anatomy we see in full context, reliant on his peers, his readers and his students in the production of his masterpiece. He is also shown to be a canny negotiator with artists and printers in the making of the book’s famous images. Ultimately Andreas Vesalius: Anatomy and the World of Books compels engagement with the construction of the ‘truthfulness’ of all scientific images, then and now. This is historical anatomy and provocation at its arresting best.' - Claudia Stein, University of Warwick
Sachiko Kusukawa is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Her books include Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (2012), which won the Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society.
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