James Baquet

    Like Copernicus, the Dutch physician Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) used a Latinized form of his birth name, Andries van Wesel. He was born in Brussels, now the capital of Belgium, but then a part of the Netherlands. The son, grandson, and great grandson of medical men, he took his doctorate at the University of Padua, Italy.

    Vesalius lived and worked in the Renaissance, a name which refers to the “rebirth” of learning after the limited scholarship of the Middle Ages. But the Renaissance was not merely a revival of ancient learning; it was also a revision.

    Throughout the Classical and Medieval Middle Ages, and on into the time of Vesalius, the primary authority on medicine and anatomy was the Roman physician Galen, who died around A.D. 200. Much of what Galen taught was simply wrong. Yet, with the support of the Roman Catholic Church, most of the Classical learning was “written in stone” as it were, and remained unchallenged.

    One of the keys to Vesalius’s greatness is that he did indeed challenge Galen’s ideas. One example: because human dissection was forbidden in Galen’s time, many of his discoveries were made in the bodies of animals, including the Barbary macaque, a kind of monkey.

    Vesalius instead performed autopsies on human cadavers, advancing the knowledge of anatomy. His discoveries were published with beautiful illustrations by professional artists. He was attacked by the traditionalists who stood by Galen; one of them even claimed that Galen had been right, but the changes Vesalius discovered were because the human body had changed since Galen’s time! Vesalius, too, made mistakes, but many of his findings were ultimately incorporated into the modern understanding of the human body.

    Vesalius spent 11 years as court physician to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and continued under Charles’s son, Philip II. On his way back from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1564, Vesalius was shipwrecked on an island in the Mediterranean Sea. His own physical remains were buried somewhere on the island of Korfu. He was barely 50 years old.

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. a journey made for religious reasons

    2. study, learning

    3. people who oppose new ideas

    4. the body of water surrounded by Europe, the Middle East, and Africa

    5. dead bodies

    6. the cutting open of a dead body

    7. the physical structure of the body, and its study

    8. examinations inside a body after its death