Botany Stands on Its Own
The biological sciences, which had made no progress since the Greek sages, now took on new life. Botany made a strenuous effort to free itself from servitude to pharmacy and stand on its own feet, and succeeded; yet its masters were inevitably still physicians. Otto Brunfels, a physician of Bern (as the source has it), began the movement with his Living Portraits of Plants (1530-1536). Most of the text was borrowed from Theophrastus, Dioscorides and other earlier writers, but it also contained exact descriptions of German native plants, and its 135 woodcuts are still perfect examples of careful observation and faithful drawing.
Euricius Cordus, a physician of Bremen, founded the first botanical garden north of the Alps (1530) and, with his Botanologicon (1534), produced the first independent summary of the young science before returning to the world of medicine to write a book on urine. His son Valerius Cordus roamed boldly in search of plants and gave his life to it at twenty-nine (1544); but the fruit of his sacrifice survives in his History of Plants, printed after his death, with exact and clear descriptions of five hundred new species. Leonhart Fuchs, professor and physician at Tubingen, first studied botany for its pharmaceutical use, but later for its own sake and for the pleasure it gave. His History of Plants (1542) was a model of devotion to science: in 343 chapters he described and analyzed 343 different plants and illustrated them with 515 woodcuts, each taking a folio page. He prepared a fuller book with 1,500 illustrations, but no publisher would bear the huge cost. His living memorial is the plant genus fuchsia.
Perhaps the most important service to biology in this period was the conclusion drawn by Pierre Belon from his researches and proved in his history of birds (1555, the exact title garbled in the source): the striking likeness, or correspondence, between the bones of man and those of birds.
Conrad Gesner
The greatest figure of the age in the natural sciences was Conrad Gesner, whose range of knowledge and research across the sciences was so broad that Cuvier called him the German Pliny, and one might as well have called him the German Aristotle. Gesner was born to a poor family in Zurich (1516), and showed such talent and diligence that the townspeople, following a few generous patrons, paid for his higher studies at Strasbourg, Bourges, Paris and Basel. He drew or collected 1,500 pictures to illustrate his history of plants, but the cost of printing was so heavy that his manuscript remained as it was until 1751. His ingenious classification of plant kinds by the structure of their reproductive organs was printed too late to be used by Carl von Linne. In his lifetime Gesner published four volumes of his large History of Animals and left the fifth unprinted. In this immense work each kind of animal was described, under its Latin name, with its appearance, origin, habitat, habits, diseases, mental and emotional qualities, medical and household uses, and even its place in literature.
The classification of animals in the book was alphabetical rather than scientific, but the information it gave was so comprehensive and useful that it shaped biology and made it an independent field. Not yet tired enough by all this, Gesner undertook his Universal Library, in twenty-one volumes, listing all known Greek, Latin and Hebrew books. He finished twenty volumes and earned the title "father of bibliography." In another side work, Mithridates (1555), he classified a hundred and thirty languages spoken on earth. His Description of Mount Pilatus (1541) seems to have been the first printed work to discuss and describe mountains as manifestations of beauty. All this was done between 1541 and 1565, the year Conrad Gesner, the living embodiment of the spirit of scientific inquiry, died.
Vives and the Beginnings of Psychology
At about the same time On the Soul and Life (1538) by Juan Luis Vives nearly founded present-day experimental psychology. As if to sidestep the scientific doubt that David Hume would raise two centuries later about the existence of a "mind" separate from the brain's operations, Vives advised his students never to ask what mind or soul "is," since (in his view) man will never find out, but to seek to know what mind "does." His other counsel was that psychology should no longer enter metaphysical argument and speculation but become a science based on definite, recorded observations. In this he stressed the method of induction a century before Francis Bacon. He studied in precise detail such topics as association of ideas, the working and growth of memory, methods of learning, and the effects of sensation and emotion. In his book we see psychology, like many sciences before it, coming into existence with pain and effort from the womb of their common mother, philosophy.
Vesalius: A Medical Family and a Passion for Anatomy
In 1543 Andreas Vesalius published a book that Sir William Osler judged the greatest medical work written up to that time. His father, Andreas Wesele, was a respected apothecary in Brussels; his grandfather was physician to Mary of Burgundy and her husband, Maximilian I; his great-uncle line included the city physician of Brussels, and a great-grandfather who was also a physician and wrote a commentary on the Canon of Avicenna (the source's genealogy is loosely worded). In this family, social inheritance was more marked than in the Bach family. Born in such surroundings, Vesalius developed from childhood an intense love of dissection. "No animal was safe from him; dogs, cats, mice, rats and moles were all dissected by him with the greatest care." Yet he pursued his other studies as well: at twenty-two he lectured in Latin and read Greek with ease. At the University of Paris he studied anatomy under Jacques Dubois (Sylvius), to whom many names of muscles and blood vessels of the human body are owed (1533-1536). Like his teachers, Vesalius accepted Galen's opinions as scripture and never lost his respect for his teaching; but he had far greater respect for scientific experience and dissection.
With some fellow students he often visited the place where bones taken from the Cemetery of the Innocents were stored, and by this practice he came to know the parts of the human skeleton so exactly that, by his own account, they sometimes dared to wager with friends that they could name correctly, blindfolded, any bone put into their hands, and in half an hour of this there was no bone they could not identify by touch alone. In the lecture room of Professor Dubois, the bold young anatomist repeatedly took the place of the "barber-surgeon," who by order of the "master physician" did the practical dissecting, and himself, with perfect skill, explained to students the organs and bones of the lesson.