Andreas Vesalius

I am currently reading (and, for some parts of it, re-reading) O'Malley's biography of the sixteenth century anatomists, Andreas Vesalius (as well as drinking some coffee from the grad lounge coffee machine (it seems to have picked up an interesting.... terroir of grad lounge filthiness, but I have a raging cold, and can't taste anything anyway).  O'Malley really seems to have closed the book on Vesalian studies-- after Roth's earlier biography of the man, this seems to be the only good biography of the dude, and besides his inclusion in every general history of medicine that was ever written, there seems to be a paucity of books dedicated to Vesalius and his work (at least in comparison with, to chose some contemporaneous examples, Nicholas Copernicus or Girolamo Cardano**).  But, at any rate, O'Malley's book is filled with some marvelous details, and it's not like books about Renaissance medicine are in short supply...

Some great quotations/hilarious anecdotes from the book:

• "Some of the dissections were apparently carried out by Vesalius alone, or possibly with certain chosen students, in his own dwellings, upon cadavers from rifled tombs or from executions, and, as he wrote in the Letter on the china root, sometimes kept in his bedroom for several weeks. Unquestionably he was an enthusiast, and just as unquestionably it was best that he had no domestic responsibilities at that time."  I understand that as a new professor, he might have had small digs, and would have trouble finding a place to put extraneous things like cadavers, but I think that leaving them in his bedroom seems a bit… strange.  Enthusiast of what, I sometimes wonder…
• Is Vesalius coming to your town?  Lock up your graveyards and guard your cadavers—whenever he traveled to give lectures in other universities, there was a wave of body-snatching in his wake.  This practice became so widespread that in 1550, the Venetian senate publicly threatened to actually enforce the existing ban against grave robbing. 
• Vesalius, on the capriciousness of artists:  “[No longer] shall I have to put up with the bad temper of artists and sculptors who made me more miserable than did the bodies I was dissecting.” (Letter on the china root).  That is pretty miserable; those bodies must have stunk up to high heaven. 
• The printer of the Fabrica, Joannes Oporinus married poorly, because (according to O’Malley, at least) the lady was “an ill-tempered shrew.”  Editorializing much?  
• Worst name encountered so far: Polycarp.  Polycarp Cratander was the son of Andreas Cratander; the two were in a father-and-son printing getup in Basel. They had decided to give up the business, and they sold all their equipment to Thomas Platter, Balthasar Ruch, Robert Winter, and Oporinus (all of whom were partners in their publishing firm)
• “As the emperor’s [Charles V] far flung empire was the result of inheritance from many sources, so like his physical and mental inheritances were the result of many and various dynastic marriages, of which some might better have been left unconsummated. […] More somber was the emperor’s inheritance from his mother, Joanna of Spain, whose mind, delicately balanced if not always somewhat unbalanced, was finally toppled by the combination of her husband’s long absences and infidelities, and then his early death in 1506.  Presumably Joana was the unlucky heir of her grandmother, a Portuguese princess who died quite mad.”  Royal lineages, so much crazy stuff!
• Oh, Vesalius, you snarky, snarky man!  “I esteem [Jean] Guinter for many reasons, an in my books I call him a teacher of medicine, but I do not consider him an anatomist, and I should willingly suffer him to inflict as many cuts on me as I have seen him attempt on man or any other animal—except at the dinner table.” 

And that's one more book that has been read. It's time to celebrate-- break out the coffee!





** Interesting fact: all three of those men practiced as physicians, although Copernicus never finished his medical degree (he instead got a degree in canon law from Ferrara).