Vesalius's Fabrica (1543): The Book That Looked Inside the Body

The title page: Vesalius dissecting in a crowded anatomical theatre. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

Anatomy in his day was taught from the ancient physician Galen. Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) did his own careful dissections, observed the body in great detail, and wrote down what he saw. His De corporis humani fabrica libri septem — Seven Books on the Fabric of the Human Body, printed in Basel by Johannes Oporinus in 1543 — leaned on Galen heavily, at times translating him word for word, but it also confirmed and refuted many of Galen's claims about the body's structure and workings. Colleagues praised him for it, and condemned him.

It became one of the most influential medical books ever printed — for its method, and for its pictures.

The anatomist

Vesalius was born in Brussels, into a family of prominent physicians from Wesel, in the Duchy of Cleves. He studied medicine in Montpellier and Paris, taught anatomy at Louvain, and served as an army surgeon in France before moving to Padua in 1537 as professor of anatomy. The year the Fabrica appeared, he was called to be a physician at the court of Charles V; his travels took him from Brussels and Basel to Madrid and the court of Philip II of Spain. On a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he was recalled to an honored chair of anatomy at Padua — but on the way back he was shipwrecked on the Greek island of Zante, where he died on October 15, 1564.

Vesalius himself, holding the arm of a dissected corpse — the portrait credited to Jan Stephan Calkar. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The pictures

The Fabrica's woodcuts shaped how anatomy was drawn for centuries, and were often copied outright. They were long credited to one man, Jan Stephan Calkar (died 1568), who had made similar images for Vesalius's Tabulae anatomicae sex of 1538 and is credited with the author's portrait. Later scholarship showed several artists at work. Vesalius made many of the sketches himself; the others are known only collectively as "the workshop of Titian."

What sets them apart is how alive the dead look. Skeletons lean on a spade or contemplate a skull; flayed men stride across open country, the layers of muscle peeled back plate by plate until little but bone is left. Even the decorated initials are anatomical — in one, small children lower a skull into a cooking pot over a fire.

An initial letter: children putting a skull into a cooking pot over a fire (page 1). Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The skeleton

A skeleton from the front, leaning on a shovel (page 163). Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

A skeleton in side view, contemplating a skull (page 164). Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The front of the skull with the jawbone removed, compared with an animal skull (page 36). Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The muscle men

The first muscle plate: a flayed figure, head tilted back, showing the muscles of the front of the body (page 170). Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The fourth muscle plate: a flayed figure standing in a landscape (page 181). Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The seventh muscle plate: a figure hanging from a rope through the skull, the chest opened (page 190). Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The ninth muscle plate: the muscles of the back (page 194). Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The thirteenth muscle plate: mostly bone, the muscles of the back hanging off it (page 206). Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

Organs, brain and tools

Dissection instruments laid out on a table (page 235). Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The base of the brain and the cranial nerves (page 418). Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

A male figure in side view, the chest cavity open (page 559). Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

This copy

The plates shown here were photographed by the National Library of Medicine from a copy of the 1543 edition. Its inside front cover carries the bookplate of the Army Medical Library; its flyleaf holds earlier owners' bookplates and a handwritten note; and the title page bears the signatures of two earlier owners. Scholarship on Vesalius and the Fabrica is still active — among the standard works are H. Cushing's A Bio-Bibliography of Andreas Vesalius (1943) and an English translation by William Frank Richardson, On the Fabric of the Human Body.

Sources

• National Library of Medicine, Historical Anatomies on the Web: Andreas Vesalius, De corporis humani fabrica libri septem. The book (1543) is in the public domain; the photographs are the library's.