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Updated: June 26, 2025
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did three things in medicine shattered authority, laid the foundation of an accurate knowledge of the structure of the human body and demonstrated how its functions should be studied intelligently with which advances, as illustrating this period, may be associated the names of Paracelsus, Vesalius and Harvey. PARACELSUS is "der Geist der stets verneint."
How far Leonardo was indebted to his friend and fellow student, della Torre, at Pavia we do not know, nor does it matter in face of the indubitable fact that in the many anatomical sketches from his hand we have the first accurate representation of the structure of the body. They are all of the same type, scientific, anatomical drawings, and that of Leonardo was done fifty years before Vesalius!
The biographer of Vesalius, who evidently shared the prejudices of the people, had exerted himself strenuously to disprove the calumny attached to the name of the great anatomist.
Very little has been added to the microscopic anatomy of the teeth since Eustachius' time. He had the advantage, of course, of being intimately in contact with the great group of Renaissance anatomists, Vesalius, Columbus, Varolius, Fallopius, and the others, the great fathers of anatomy.
Compare, too, this figure of the bones of the foot with a similar one from Vesalius. Insatiate in experiment, intellectually as greedy as Aristotle, painter, poet, sculptor, engineer, architect, mathematician, chemist, botanist, aeronaut, musician and withal a dreamer and mystic, full accomplishment in any one department was not for him!
The two most distinguished names are Herophilus who, Pliny says, has the honor of being the first physician "who searched into the causes of disease" and Erasistratus. Herophilus, ille anatomicorum coryphaeus, as Vesalius calls him, was a pupil of Praxagoras, and his name is still in everyday use by medical students, attached to the torcular Herophili.
A fact that will, perhaps, give the best idea to modern readers of the place of Rhazes in the history of medicine is that Vesalius considered it worth his while to make a translation of his principal work. Unfortunately that translation has not come down to us.
Tongue, if you please. Tongue is put out. Forget to look at it, or, rather, to take any particular notice of it; but what is that white object, with the long arm stretching up as if pointing to the sky, just as Vesalius and Spigelius and those old fellows used to put their skeletons? I don't think anything of such objects, you know; but what should he have it in his chamber for?
Like Aristotle and Hippocrates cradled and nurtured in an AEsculapian family, Vesalius was from his childhood a student of nature, and was now a wandering scholar, far from his Belgian home. But in Italy he had found what neither Louvain nor Paris could give, freedom in his studies and golden opportunities for research in anatomy.
Just as in the time of Reuchlin and Erasmus they insisted on binding Christianity to Thomas Aquinas, so in the time of Vesalius such men gave all efforts to linking Christianity to Galen. The cry has been the same in all ages.
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