Louvain and the Road to Padua
When Charles V, Vesalius's patron, invaded France (1536), Vesalius took refuge in Louvain. Since study there was hampered by a lack of human bodies, he and a friend, Gemma Frisius (later a famous mathematician), went searching and by chance obtained remains for their studies; his own account shows his intense devotion to scientific inquiry. He tells how they went outside the city to a place where the remains of the condemned were left, found bones held together only by ligaments, and carried them home piece by piece in repeated secret trips, once staying outside until the gate was shut against him, "burning with eagerness." The mayor learned of the secret and thereafter sent a body to his anatomy class whenever he could; as Vesalius records, "the mayor himself regularly attended my lectures." A man of such "fire of zeal" could not stay cool. After a sharp dispute with one of the teachers over methods of bloodletting, he left Louvain (1537), followed the Rhine and crossed the Alps into Italy.
His mastery of the natural sciences was already such that before the year was out he received his doctorate at Padua with the "maximum reduction" in the degree fee, since by the university's rules the higher a student's merit, the lower the fee. The next day (6 December 1537) the Venetian senate appointed him professor of anatomy and surgery there. Vesalius was twenty-three. For the next six years he went on teaching at Padua, Bologna and Pisa, dissecting hundreds of bodies with his own hands and occasionally publishing small works. Under his direction Jan Stephan van Calcar, a pupil of Titian, made six plates of the human body, printed as anatomical tables (1538). The next year Vesalius, in a letter on bloodletting, supported the methods of Pierre Brissot of Paris. In discussing it he described some results of his experience with the system of the body's veins, observations that prepared the ground for the discovery of the circulation of the blood.
Against Galen
In 1541-1542, with several other scholars, he helped prepare a new edition of the Greek text of Galen. He was greatly astonished by Galen's many errors on matters that the simplest human dissection could settle: according to Galen the human lower jaw consisted of two parts, the breastbone had seven separate segments, and the liver was formed of several lobes. Only on the assumption that Galen had dissected animals alone could his errors be excused. Vesalius felt it was time to revise the science of human anatomy and found it on the dissection of the human body itself. He set about his masterpiece.
The Fabrica
In 1543 Johannes Oporinus published at Basel Vesalius's 663-page book On the Fabric of the Human Body in large format. What must first have astonished its reader was the title page, an engraving worthy of the hand of a Durer (the attribution is the source's own), showing Vesalius presenting the anatomy of a dissected arm to fifty of his pupils watching. Next came the illustrations: 227 woodcuts of unequalled precision in showing the features of the human body and of great technical skill, designed by van Calcar. Among the backgrounds were scenes irrelevant to science but artistically charming, such as a skeleton seated reading beside a table.
The woodcuts were so fine that some have ascribed them to the workshop of Titian, or to his supervision of the draftsman's hand; to refute this it suffices to say that a number of the illustrations were by Vesalius himself. He personally supervised the carrying of the blocks from Venice to Basel, taking great care to bring them over the Alps on muleback. After the printing the blocks were still wholly intact; they were later bought and passed from hand to hand until their trace was lost; in 1893 the set was found hidden in the library of the University of Munich, and in World War II bombing destroyed it.
Even more astonishing than the pictures was the text: a revolution in the world of science, written by a young man of twenty-nine, which ended the intellectual rule of Galen in anatomy, revising it on the strength of observation and practical dissection, and so laying the natural foundation of modern medicine, which in fact began with this book. For the first time the course of veins and the anatomy of the heart were described correctly and truthfully. In this book Vesalius made his historic announcement: by dissection of the heart he proved that, contrary to Galen, there are no passages between the two ventricles through which blood could pass from one to the other. Thus the way was cleared for the later advances of Servetus, Colombo and Harvey. He corrected Galen repeatedly, for example on the liver, the bile ducts, the upper jaw and the uterus, but he himself was not free of many mistakes even in his experimental observations, so that in the end he did not manage to leap from an exact anatomy of the heart to the discovery of the circulation. Instead, this important work is full of correct descriptions of dozens of human organs that before him had not been fully known.
Pride and Enemies
With his skilled and steady hands Vesalius laid the parts of the body open before the eyes of science. He suffered greatly from the faults of his own character. The same pride that kept him steadfast through years of study and research also made him touchy, careless in giving predecessors their due, and a provoker of his rivals' sensitivity. So devoted was he to "that true scripture ... the human body and human nature" that he carelessly offended many theologians, mocking, for instance, certain clerics who attended his lectures with particular eagerness at certain demonstrations. Thus Vesalius made enemies; and although men like Gesner and Fallopio applauded his work, most of the older professors, including his own former teacher Dubois, accused him of presumption and novelty and watched for a chance to find an error in his writings. Dubois explained that Galen had not erred, but that the human body had changed since his time. For example, he said, the human thighbone, which anyone can see is straight, contrary to Galen's description of a curve, had been so altered in that very age by the tight trousers Europeans wore.
Court Physician in Spain
In a storm of vexation and anger at the behavior of such men, Vesalius burned the thick volume of notes and commentary he had written on the ten books of Rhazes' Almansor, an encyclopedia of medicine. In 1544 he left Italy and entered the service of Charles V as second court physician, the same ruler to whom, with sound judgment, he had dedicated his Fabric. That year his father died, leaving him a considerable estate. Vesalius married and furnished a handsome house in Brussels. In 1555 the second edition appeared, with the text enlarged and corrected. It showed that by artificial respiration a creature with an opened chest could be kept alive for a time, and that a heart that had stopped could sometimes be set beating again with the help of a bellows. After that Vesalius did no further service to anatomy. He devoted his life to attending the emperor and his entourage, and applied himself more to the practice and study of surgery. When Charles abdicated, Vesalius became second physician to Philip II. In July 1559 the king sent him to help Ambroise Pare treat the wounded Henry II, in the hope of saving him from death. Through clinical examination Vesalius showed that there was no chance of recovery. Shortly afterward, in the same year, Vesalius and his family returned to Spain in Philip's train.
Others in these years helped the growth of anatomy. Giovanni Battista Canano identified and recorded the valves of the veins (1547); Servetus explained the pulmonary passage of the blood (1553); Realdo Colombo rediscovered the same passage (1558) and demonstrated it by an experiment on a living heart; but seventy more years were needed before Harvey made his revolutionary discovery and described exactly the flow of blood from the heart to the lungs, to the heart, to the arteries, to the veins and to the heart again. Ibn al-Nafis, an Arab physician, had anticipated Servetus in 1285 by describing the pulmonary passage of the blood, and probably some version of his teaching had seeped into Spain and continued down to Servetus's youth.
Don Carlos and the Last Years
Events remained in Vesalius's life. The native physicians of the Spanish court took pride in treating his diagnoses and treatments as nothing. When Don Carlos, Philip's only son, suffered a brain concussion from a fall (1562), Vesalius advised opening the skull. His colleagues rejected the proposal and the young man neared death. Relics of saints and amulets were laid on the wound and devout believers whipped themselves to force heaven to send a miraculous cure, to no effect. Vesalius insisted again on trepanning; at last it was done and a large quantity of pus was drawn from the patient's brain. Soon the prince began to recover, and Philip II eight days later took part in a splendid religious service to thank a merciful God.
Two years later Vesalius left Spain, for reasons still disputed. Ambroise Pare tells of an anatomist who dissected the body of a woman who had apparently died of "suffocation of the womb," and so set most of Spain against him; according to Pare the surgeon brought the dead woman back to life with a stroke of his scalpel, "and so astonished and frightened her relatives that all of them ... called the physician hateful and infamous, despite his good name and record." Naturally the kin of the dead do not generally welcome such unexpected cures. The Huguenot surgeon went on: "so the physician thought no other course was left for him to live but exile." Another Huguenot (the name is garbled in the source; perhaps Hubert Languet) told a similar story about a physician named Vesalius (about 1579), saying that he was arrested by the Inquisition for dissecting a living human being and saved himself by promising to make a pilgrimage to Palestine in penance. But no historical source of the time mentions the event, and Christian historians have counted it a legend. Perhaps Vesalius was simply tired of Spain and left.
He returned to Italy and apparently sailed from Venice for Jerusalem (April 1564). On the return voyage the ship was wrecked and he was cast ashore on the island of Zante off the western coast of Greece, where for lack of help he died (15 October 1564). Vesalius lived fifty years. In the year of his death Michelangelo died and Shakespeare was born. The splendor that had held eyes on Italy for a century was now turning north.