Today, a young man changes medicine. The University
of Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
We don't usually think of
Shakespeare when we think of the Renaissance. Yet
he was its creature just as surely as Leonardo da
Vinci was. The Renaissance brought the focus of art
and science right down on the human occupants of
this world. Shakespeare, the quintessential
humanist, reflected that view when he said, "Man is
the measure of all things."
And Renaissance artists measured man in a detail
that was unprecedented. Leonardo was far better
informed on human anatomy than the physicians of
his day. Renaissance fascination with humanity and
the human lot resulted in an intensely detailed
study of our own mechanical makeup. Kenneth Clark
reads through Leonardo's notebooks and says,
One is absolutely worn out by his energy. He
won't take yes for an answer. He can't leave
anything alone.
Renaissance artists were propelled by
this craving to know and understand; but Renaissance
physicians did little more than rediscover the Roman
anatomist Galen. In a typical class, a professor read
1300-year-old Galenic texts from a lectern. On a
table below, a barber cut pieces from a cadaver and a
demonstrator showed them around. The relation of the
crude work below to the classic Latin text was never
very precise.
Into this world stepped a 19-year-old medical
student named Andreas Vesalius. His frustration got
the best of him by his third dissection. He took
the knife from the barber and went at the cadaver
himself. By the age of 28, now the leading
anatomist of his age, he produced the first modern
text on the subject.
The title was On the Workings of the Human
Body. It came out in 1543, the same year
Copernicus published his treatise on the solar
system. Vesalius understood what artists had been
doing, and he turned to a student of Titian for
sumptuous illustrations -- rich, detailed cutaway
drawings.
Vesalius began as an admirer of Galen's methods,
but in the end his text had to include over 200
corrections of Galen's work. The importance of the
book was immediately clear. In no time, Galenic
physicians poured out their bile on Vesalius. After
six months he had such a bellyful of their attacks
that he burned his remaining notes and went off to
work as a court physician.
He did little more with his life, but his anatomy
text signaled the return to experimental science
and reset the entire center of gravity of medicine.
More than that, it put the human soul and human
values back into the gruesome study of the human
body.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Nuland, S.B., Doctors: The Biography of
Medicine. New York, Vintage Books, 1988.
Clark, K., Civilisation: A Personal
View. New York: Harper and Row, 1969,
Chapters 4 and 5. (This is also available on
videotape and film.)
For more on Vesalius's wood blocks, see Episode 956.
Vasalius' frontispiece showing a 16th century
dissection theatre. In the second edition, he had
the plate redone with his own face on the barber
surgeon doing the dissection
Vasalius doing a dissection
Vesalius shows a the dissection of a very human
skull
Woodcuts from Vesalius' de
Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septum,
1543
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard.
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