This paper deals with two main topics. The first part provides data on the life of Andreas Vesalius, a scholar and anatomist of the 16th century, and describes the environment in which he lived and worked. It highlights his personality of a great doctor and teacher and points out the importance of his scientific methods and techniques as opposed to speculative methods that were prevalent in the...

The fame of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) rests on his anatomy text, De humani corporis fabrica, regarded as a seminal book in modern medicine. It was compiled while he taught anatomy at Padua, 1537-1543. Some of his findings challenged Galen's writings of the 2c AD, and caused De fabrica to be rejected immediately by classically trained anatomists. At age 29, Vesalius abandoned his studies and ...

Andreas Vesalius' (1514-64) first publication was a Paraphrasis of the ninth book of the Liber ad Almansorem, written by the Arab-Persian physician and alchemist Rhazes (854-925). The role of Rhazes in Vesalius' oeuvre has thus far been much disregarded. The different ways Rhazes recurs reveal an intellectual evolution in Vesalius' work. In the Paraphrasis, Vesalius subjects Rhazes to the autho...

The pleasure of the undertaking lies not in reaching Xanadu-I am sure that no true scholar has yet found rest in that fabulous city-but rather in disclosing the road that leads ever onward to that goal. As the author states, such a venture into bibliography is to follow a path which enters "a dark forest full of unsuspected brambles." It is obvious that the brambles but exerted a stimulus, for ...

Andreas Vesalius and Jan Baptist Van Helmont are the two major personalities who contributed substantially and in a different way to the early development of renal anatomy/physiology of the 16th/17th century in the Southern Low Countries. The importance of A. Vesalius' publication 'de humani corporis fabrica libri septem' cannot be overestimated. The kidney was an intriguing organ to Vesalius, ...

Introduction As we commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the death of Andreas Vesalius, our thoughts may turn to another sixteenth-century figure who made an epoch-making contribution to medicine: to Paracelsus.1 At first glance, they seem as much alike as fire and water. Their life and work had its setting in different cultural milieus. The tempestuous character of the German reformati...

The De humani corporis fabrica [The Fabric of the Human Body], Basle, 1543, of Andreas Vesalius is deservedly famous as the first modern book of anatomy. A second edition was published in Basle in 1555, but little is known of Vesalius' activities after that date. This article discusses a recent find: Vesalius' own copy of the 1555 edition, heavily annotated in preparation for a never published ...