Individual Article:
"Bone is the hardest and driest of all parts of the human body, the most earthy and cold, and, with the sole exception of the teeth, most lacking in sensation. God, the supreme maker of things, rightly made its substance of this temperament so as to supply the entire body with a kind of foundation. For what walls and beams provide in houses, poles in tents, and keels and ribs in ships, the substance of bones provides in the fabric of man."
So begins the first book of Andreas Vesalius’ 16th-century anatomy masterpiece De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). This expressive opening, dramatically different from the dry and efficient prose common to modern anatomy texts, epitomizes the author’s fluid, graceful (albeit difficult) writing style, which borrows heavily from his classical predecessors.
Two Northwestern professors – Daniel Garrison, professor of classics in the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and Malcolm Hast, professor emeritus of otolaryngology—head and neck surgery in the Feinberg School of Medicine – have translated, annotated, and electronically published the first book of the Fabrica. (The complete Fabrica contains seven books.) University Library staff, in conjunction with Academic Technologies and the Galter Health Sciences Library, partnered with Garrison and Hast to give this important work an online presence and make it available for free to a worldwide audience. The new online edition of the atlas is now available at http://vesalius.northwestern.edu.
Andreas Vesalius (1514 – 1564) began a classically influenced education in his native Brussels, where he received instruction in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. By 1533 he had determined to study medicine and that year moved to Paris to continue his education. Medical scholars in Paris were returning to original Greek editions of the works of ancient pioneers such as Galen and Hippocrates and correcting errors introduced through several generations of translation. They were also beginning to rely more heavily on the practice of direct observation of human dissection as opposed to animal dissection.
While practicing as a surgery instructor in Padua in 1538, Vesalius published a short work, Tabulae anatomicae sex (Six Anatomical Tables), which was almost immediately successful across Europe and presaged the style and approach he was to adopt with his later masterpiece, the Fabrica. Vesalius arranges his text around lush drawings executed by artists working from his original sketches. Unlike many earlier anatomy texts, these drawings are intricate and clean, full of detail, and based primarily on direct observation.
Throughout his time as an instructor, Vesalius compiled notes on errors and inaccuracies he uncovered in the works of the ancients as well as discoveries he made through dissections and direct analysis of the human body. These notes were incorporated in the massive Fabrica, which he wrote over the course of two years and completed in 1542. Johannes Oporinus, a printer in Basel, published the first edition in 1543. Vesalius’s written instructions to Oporinus were included in this first edition of the Fabrica (following a dedication to emperor Charles V) and draw attention to the work’s delicate lines and shading. He asks the printer to retain the meticulous markings on the images and in the margins of the pages and to use the best quality paper to avoid obscuring the contents of images and text.
When Garrison and Hast began their translation of the Fabrica more than 10 years ago, they discovered that many of the smallest details in the images had indeed been obscured when ink was applied to woodcut and woodcut to paper. Early on, Garrison digitally scanned all 272 images at very high resolution. Then, pixel by pixel, he digitally touched up each image based on evidence from other research, alternate printings, and Vesalius’s own surrounding descriptions.
Building the electronic edition of the first book of the Fabrica, which covers the skeletal system, took a team of librarians and technology specialists a year and a half. Most of this work involved laying the foundation for a very large and dense publication: the first book alone weighs in at 253,000 words. The text contains faithful reproductions of Vesalius’s original polytonic Greek and his occasional Hebrew. Tools were constructed to allow users to zoom in on the intricate illustrations. Readers can also use a highlighting feature to relate a label on an image to the text excerpt that describes it.
This beautiful, revolutionary masterwork has never been completely translated into English, due in no small part to the density and difficulty of the Latin in which it was written. Other scholars, including a team currently working in New Zealand, have attempted to simultaneously translate and modernize Vesalius’s language. Garrison and Hast, in their translation, have taken great pains to preserve the original flow of language and have provided the modern Latin anatomical names, or nominae anatomicae, for the body parts Vesalius discusses. Extensive footnotes in the online edition clarify difficult passages, incorporate changes made in the 1555 edition, and cite Vesalius’s ancient sources, noting where he has borrowed from Galen, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Cicero.
The translators have drawn on a number of editions of the Fabrica in the course of their work. Garrison owns a facsimile of the 1543 edition, which was the source of many of the digitally scanned images. The Galter Health Sciences Library on Northwestern’s Chicago campus owns a rare 1555 edition. James Shedlock, director of the Galter Library, generously loaned Galter’s edition to the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections to provide Garrison with access to the text and images.
Scholarly publishing is widely believed to be in crisis, as demonstrated by the skyrocketing cost of academic journals and a concurrent decrease in scholarly monographic publication. Universities are seeking alternate publishing models that leverage the power of technology to improve access and reduce costs. Many of these initiatives focus on journal publishing, where a nexus of issues – peer review, academic society sponsorship, and intellectual property – intertwine. Publication of electronic scholarly books, however, is still quite rare. Academic libraries have strongly advocated these new models, but whether libraries will play a major or supporting role in electronic publishing remains to be seen.
The online edition of the Fabrica does not seek to replace print publication. When the translation of all seven books is complete, Thoemmes Press in Bristol, England, will publish a multi-volume print version of the annotated translation. The online edition is a vehicle for rapid and widespread dissemination of scholarship. The World Wide Web allows users to interact with the text and images in ways that are not possible with a printed work.
Garrison and Hast’s work on the Fabrica is supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine. Bill Parod, humanities computing specialist in Academic Technologies, and Claire Stewart, head of the Digital Media Services unit of the Library’s Marjorie I. Mitchell Multimedia Center, are leading the technical work. The team began work on the second book – “Dedicated to All the Ligaments and Muscles” – in summer 2003.