Biography

Andries van Wesele, better known as Andreas Vesalius,

was born in the Silvesternight of 1514. His family was Flemish. His father was court-apothecary of the Holy Roman Emperor Carolus V. His grandfather had been a physician to the Emperor Maximilian, and his great-grandfather was physician to the city of Brussels and one of the very first professors of the new University in Louvain.

As a boy, Andreas Vesalius dissected cadavers of stray dogs, cats and rats he found in the streets of Brussels. Eventually, his "furor anatomicus" became a compulsion to dissect the human body in order to present exact descriptions of all its parts.

Louvain 1528-1533

He attended the University of Louvain where he studied Greek, Latin and Hebrew at the Pedagogium Castri and the Collegium Trilingue. One of his fellow students was Anthony Perrenot, later Bishop Granvelle and imperial chancellor. To the latter he owed a certain degree of favor at the imperial court.

In Paris his most important teachers were Jacobus Sylvius (1478-1555) and Johannes Gunterius von Andernach (1505-1574).

Gunterius von Andernach taught Greek and Latin, and established a reputation for himself as a anatomist by translating the works of Galenus, an ancient Greek physician. Gunterius was a linguist rather than a physician. He had no experience in dissecting, and was very glad that Vesalius proposed him to do the dissecting himself during the lessons.

 

 

Sylvius was a gifted teacher but also an ardent adept of the works of Galenus. For more than a millennium Galenus' books were the bible of medicine and according to Sylvius, they could not be improved. His allegiance to Galenus was so profound that he once remarked that any structure found in contemporary man which differed from the Galenic description, could only be due to a later decadence and degeneration of mankind.


 

 

Although the University of Paris was famous for its medical teaching, it was extremely conservative. Moreover, there were no teachers in practical anatomy. To perfection his knowledge of the bones, Vesalius went out to the gibbets of the Montfaucon and removed the abandoned cadavers. With his friend Matheus Terminus he frequented the Cimetière des Saints Innocents, the ancient graveyard of the Parisians, and robbed the charnel house. Reconstruction of the city wall had necissitated disinterment of many corpses, and the bones had been stored in a series of charnel houses. Taking advantage of this abundant supply Vesalius noticed the first misconception of Galenus. He noted that the human jaw is one single bone, not two.

 

Having obtained his baccalaureate, Vesalius set out for Italy where he believed were greater opportunities for the study of anatomy and medicine. At that time, Padua and Venice reigned supreme, not only in the arts, literature and philosophy, but also as the center of the scientific renaissance. Under the tutelage of Giambattista Da Monte, professor of medicine, Vesalius began to visit the sick.

 


 

In Venice Vesalius made the acquaintance of a fellow countryman, the artist Johan Stefan van Kalkar, an apprentice of Titiaan. In the light of he opus magnum of Vesalius it was the meeting of the century.

On 5 December 1537 the Medical Faculty of Padua granted Vesalius the degree of doctor of Medicine "cum ultima diminutione" (with the highest distinction). On the following day, Vesalius dissected a 18 year old boy who was taken from his grave. After that dissection, he was nominated professor of Surgery and Anatomy by the "Illustrious Senate of Venice". In this function, he succeeded Paolo Colombo da Cremona. At that time Vesalius was only 23 years of age.

In his anatomical courses Vesalius introduced the use of drawings as study aids, thus engendering the opposition of professors who felt students should be reading rather than looking at pictures. Vesalius, in contrast, thought students could learn more anatomy at a butcher shop than from professors sitting in their high chairs, and talking about things they had never seen but simply memorized from books. He came to insist that students see, feel and learn for themselves what the human body really was like.

In teaching dissection, he immediately departed from custom, which dictated that the professor should sit in an elevated chair, read from a text of Galenus or Mondinus and watch while an unskilled barber-surgeon conducted the dissection. Instead, Vesalius descended from the chair and he himself handled the body and dissected the organs. In doing so he destroyed the foundation of the whole teaching of Galenism and the belief in its authority, and paved the way for the free investigation of nature.

During his further research Vesalius showed that the anatomical teachings of Galenus, revered in medical schools, was based upon he dissections of animals even though they were meant as a guide to the human body.

A lack of cadavers suitable for dissection and study hampered the study of anatomy in Vesalius' day. The only bodies legally available for dissection were those of executed criminals. Vesalius seized every opportunity he could to gather specimens.

Soon after the publication of his book Vesalius abandoned his professorship in Padua to practice medicine at the court of Emperor Charles V. He became one of the "medicus familiaris ordinarius" and followed Charles on his many trips, campaigns and wars.

The emperor was a difficult patient. He suffered from gout, asthma, stomachache, hemorroids, etc. and seldom followed the advice of Vesalius. He refused to restrict his exotic and bizarre appetite and was always ready to lend a willing ear to any quack who had some nostrum to sell or who promised him relief from his chronic ailment without a diet.

 

 

In the years 1540-1544 Vesalius was invited to lecture at Padua, Bologna and Pisa. Cosimo de Medici, the Duke of Tuscany, proposed Vesalius to conduct a course on anatomy at the newly established University of Pisa. In January Vesalius did an autopsy in Pisa. Dissection material and a dead body, was floated down the Arno to Pisa and a temporary theatre was erected for the occasion. The proceedings were enlivened by the collapse of the scaffolding, so great was the press to view the demonstration. Duke Cosimo appreciated the abilities of Vesalius and attempted to gain his service on a permanent basis. But Vesalius was committed to the emperor and had to join urgently the military forces because a war with the French had broken out in the summer of 1544.

Before the walls of Saint-Dizier René of Nassau,Prince of Orange-Châlon, the Lord of Halvin and many others were mortally wounded by the fiery bombs. They were autopsied by Vesalius to determine the cause of death. At that time it was universally believed that death was due to the poisonous effects of the gunpowder. Vesalius had also the duty of embalming the dead for the bodies of the nobility had to be transported home for burial.

Within the walls of Saint-Dizier, attached to the opposing forces of France, was Ambroise Paré (1510-1590), the most famous surgeon of that time. It was Paré who popularized the Fabrica and the Vesalian teaching among surgeons by writing an epitome of it in the vernacular. Paré's greatest contribution to surgery was the disproof that gunshot wounds were poisonous. Hence he discarded the barbaric dressing of the wounds with boiling oil.

In the meantime Vesalius' father, the imperial apothecary, had died leaving his son a considerable inheritance, which included the family residence in Brussels. Vesalius married Anna van Hamme in July 1545. A year later his only child, Anna was born.

 

Vesalius was not only a famous anatomist, with his astonishing anatomical knowledge he became one of the most wanted physicians of his time. He was the first who ever diagnosed an aneurysma dissecans aortae in a living person that he later conformed by autopsy. He was the only physician who dared evacuate a pleural abscess. From many colleges he received letters of advice on difficult problems. He was summoned to the mortally wounded King of France, Henry II in 1559. In the same year, Filip II invited him to care for his son Carlos, the prince of Aragon who was comatose following an unlucky fall. He treated or gave advice on the illnesses of the most famous patients of his time including Bernardo Navagero, a Venetian ambassador, de Princes of Oranje-Nassau, the sister of Cardinal Granvelle, the Bishop of Limoges, and Leonhard Welser, a patrician of Augsburg.