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Vesalius: On the Fabric of the Human Body

This site provides access to an English translation of book one of Andreas Vesalius' anatomical atlas, On the Fabric of the Human Body. Originally published in 1543 and revised in 1555, the atlas offers a detailed account of human anatomy and a selection of beautiful and intricate anatomical drawings. This is the first English translation of the atlas to be published online. Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (1514-1564) produced his original atlas at age 28, relying on direct observation of the human body as opposed to the study of ancient books that was popular at the time. Vesalius challenged the works of anatomists such as Galen (2nd century AD), whose study of human anatomy was based on the barbary ape and other animals instead of on human cadavers. Vesalius' work transformed the study of human anatomy and his illustrations have had an enduring influence on medical art and illustration. According to The Oxford Medical Companion, Vesalius' atlas is "probably the most influential of all medical works." The site includes the complete annotated text of the first book of the atlas, which represents about one quarter of the total work. Eventually all seven books of the original atlas and substantive revisions in the 1555 edition will be translated and made available online. The site also includes edited reproductions of the detailed diagrams and anatomical woodcuts in both editions of the atlas (a total of 272 illustrations)

CONTACT: Wendy Leopold at (847) 491-4890 or at w-leopold@northwestern.edu

FOR RELEASE: Immediate

SIXTEENTH CENTURY SCIENCE TREASURE MEETS TWENTY FIRST CENTURY TECHNOLOGY
EVANSTON, Ill. --- One of the world's great treasures of Renaissance bookmaking and most ambitious and comprehensive surveys of human anatomy is being translated into English from Latin and published on the World Wide Web. For the first time, the first and longest book of the 16th century anatomical atlas "On the Fabric of the Human Body" (De Humani Corporis Fabrica) now can be viewed online at http://vesalius.northwestern.edu, thanks to the efforts of two tireless Northwestern University professors and a team of librarians and technology experts.

Andreas Vesalius published "On the Fabric of the Human Body" in 1543, the same year Copernicus published "Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies." And just as Copernicus forever changed our ideas about the place of man in the cosmos, Vesalius -- proclaiming that the body itself is the textbook from which our understanding of the human body arises - revolutionized science and medical education.

By demonstrating the importance of direct observation of human specimens, the young Flemish anatomist and surgeon put the study of science and medicine on a new course, leading to breakthroughs such as William Harvey's discovery in 1628 of the circulation of blood.

The Oxford Medical Companion refers to Vesalius' magnificent anatomical atlas as "probably the most influential of all medical works." The great 20th century neurosurgeon and Vesalius biographer Harvey Cushing described it as one of the "most admired (but) least read" great books of science. With the Web site, Northwestern Professors Daniel Garrison and Malcolm Hast hope the "Fabrica" will finally get the audience it is due.

The "Fabrica," which Vesalius revised in 1555, provides a detailed account of the workings of the human body and 272 intricate woodcut drawings and diagrams believed to have been created in the studio of the great Renaissance artist Titian. By applying 2lst century computer technology to the 16th century work, Professors Garrison and Hast have taken an epochal scientific work out of the research library and made it available to historians of science and medicine, Renaissance scholars, art historians, anatomy buffs and the general public.
"If today we view the body's inner fabric with admiration instead of disgust, it is in part because Vesalius described it that way in the 'Fabrica' and posed his anatomical art in ways that invoked the ancient and Renaissance fascination with Nature's masterpiece (the human body)," says Garrison, professor of classics at Northwestern.
In addition to transforming medical education and anatomy, the "Fabrica" has had an enduring influence on medical art. Its illustrations became the very basis of medical art and illustration for generations and continue to influence the way we view the human body.
The new Web site includes the complete annotated text and all 87 images of the first book of the "Fabrica," which represents about one quarter of the work. The six other books of the 1543 "Fabrica" and substantive revisions from the 1555 edition will be translated and added to the Web site. The site will then include edited reproductions of all the illustrations from both editions.
Vesalius, who lived from 1515 to 1564 and produced the "Fabrica" at age 28, was considered in his time a scientific "enfant terrible." By relying more on observation and dissection than on the study of ancient books, he challenged the Greek Galen whose conception of the human body --though based on the study of farm animals and Barbary apes -- had been accepted for more than 14 centuries.
At a time when Christians and Jews were still uncomfortable about the use of human cadavers, Vesalius performed dramatic human dissections before audiences of hundreds of physicians, art students, medical students and others in large theatres in Pisa, Padua, and Bologna.
He proudly recorded how he once stole a body hanging from a gibbet outside the town gate, and prepared and mounted it as a demonstration skeleton, supplying the missing hand and leg bones from another corpse.
And instead of bringing in butchers to do the handiwork of his dissections, Vesalius himself worked on the human cadavers and advised students of medicine to do the same. In doing so, he helped to reinstate surgery, which had been disregarded in science since the time of the Romans, as one of the central crafts of medicine.
The translation of the first book represents a decade of work and "endless tribulation" by Garrison and Hast, professor emeritus of otolaryngology in Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine.
Their online edition of the "Fabrica" includes modern Latin names for all parts of the body mentioned by Vesalius and footnotes on anatomy, contemporaries mentioned by Vesalius, and ancient Greek and Roman sources.
"The Latin of the 'Fabrica' is hideously difficult," says Garrison, who has been reading Latin since he was 13. "It's not so much the terminology that makes it such a killer challenge but the potential for unintentional ambiguity in the language."
Vesalius may have learned his Humanist Latin as a student of the great scholar Erasmus, says Garrison, who revels in the rich, long history of his study. His Latin, while technically correct, is long-winded and written to impress where it should simply inform.
Hast and Garrrison have made arrangements for a very high-quality print publication of the "Fabrica" but chose deliberately to make their work available on the World Wide Web as it progresses. The Web enhances the ways in which visitors to the site can interact with the text and drawings, they say, and will vastly widen its audience.
The images can be enlarged and viewed next to the text for each specific anatomical feature -- something that doesn't work well in a book, where you have to flip from page to page. Another powerful feature of the online edition is the ability to search text, references to figures, and anatomical terms.
Developing the technology for the online edition of the "Fabrica" was the work of staff at Northwestern's Galter Health Sciences Library, the University Library, and Academic Technologies. One of the project's challenges involved digitizing and editing the illustrations so they could be used in the online edition.
"The chief object of the graphical editing was to clean up the tiny Greek and Roman characters and other glyphs in the illustrations to make them more legible," says Garrison, who has made repairs to two kinds of artifacts resulting from the original production of the woodcuts on the spongy, irregular paper used in 16th century printing.
They are dropouts where the inked block did not entirely meet the surface of the paper, and blots where too much ink bled onto the paper. "Since no two woodcut impressions are identical, these repairs require a close reading of what Vesalius wrote about the illustrations in his figure legends, repeated scrutiny and a certain amount of guesswork based on evidence found in original specimens and in reproductions of these originals," Garrison says. For their work, Garrison and Hast had access to a rare copy of the 1555 "Fabrica" owned by the Feinberg School of Medicine's Galter Library.
The Vesalius project was made possible with support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine. For further information, particularly about the technology of the Web site, read the Fact Sheet that accompanies this release.
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