The Place of Vesalius in the Culture of the Renaissance

MUST BEGIN with expressing my cordial thanks for your kind invitation. It is a great pleasure to me and I regard it as a great privilege to be asked to participate in this celebration-1 t of the four-hundredth anniversary of Vesalius' De hIumani corporis fabrica. But I have to confess that I felt serious scruples about my competence for the task you have assigned to me. Is a philosopher entitled to speak about Vesalius' work, the work of a great physician and a great anatomist? Like Galileo, Vesalius was engaged in a continuous struggle against philosophical authorities. He denied and defied the scholastic tradition. His work seems to be entirely original. "Immor-tale opus," said Albrecht von Haller, the great physiologist, in speaking of De humani corporis fabrica, "et quo priora omnia quae ante se scripta fuissent paene reddidit superfiua'-an immortal work which made superfluous almost all that had been written before. Nevertheless, there are no isolated facts and no isolated figures in the history of human thought. Even Vesalius does not stand alone. He is a typical example and a classical witness to the spirit of the Renaissance. But what does Renaissance mean? There are scholars-and scholars of high authority in their special fields-that have warned us against the use of the very term Renaissance. Many of them flatly deny that there ever was such a thing as a renaissance in European culture. "What is the use in questioning the Renais-sance?" wrote Lynn Thorndike in one of the last issues of the Journal of the History of Ideas. "No one has ever proved its existence, no one has really tried to." But we must not dispute about words. Recent research-made by men like Pierre Duhem, George Sarton, Lynn Thorndike-has shown us that there are innumerable threads which connect the scientific work of the Quat-trocento and Cinquecento with medieval science-with that science that was taught at the universities of the Middle Ages. But that the work of Vesalius or Galileo was an immense progress and has a