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Andreas Vesalius

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Andreas Vesalius

I. Biography

Andreas Vesalius was born on Dec. 31, 1514, in Brussels, the son of Andries van Wesele and his wife, Isabel Crabbe. Vesalius's paternal ancestors, who hailed from the German town of Wesel, came to Brussels in the early 15th century and became prominent as physicians and pharmacists. His father served as pharmacist to Margaret of Austria and later to Emperor Charles V. His great-grandfather, Johannes Wesalia, was the head of the medical school at the University of Louvain, where Vesalius started his medical studies in 1530. He matriculated as Andres van Wesel de Bruxella.
In 1533 Vesalius transferred to the medical school of the University of Paris. One of his two teachers of anatomy there was Johann …show more content…

He sought to locate the precise site for venesection in pleurisy within the framework of the classical method. The real significance of the book attempt to support his arguments by the location and continuity of the venous system from his observations rather than appeal to earlier published works. With this novel approach to the problem of venesection, Vesalius posed the then striking hypothesis that anatomical dissection might be used to test speculation.

The second edition of the Fabrica, in 1555, contained many improvements on the first, but in retrospect it was also a disappointment. One wonders about the new course medicine might have taken, had Vesalius dedicated himself completely to the cause of anatomical research. Some time after the accession of Philip II to the imperial throne, Vesalius became again one of the imperial physicians. Vesalius's absence from medical schools showed itself in his Examination of Gabriele Fallopio's Anatomic Observations (1561), in which he had to avoid passing judgment on a number of points in Fallopio's book because he had no way of verifying them.
It is a moot question whether Vesalius used a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1564 as a pretext to leave Spain and the imperial court. Some claimed that he went to the Holy Land to study medicinal plants on the plains of Jericho, a topic on which he is known to have discoursed on his way there. Vesalius might have very well made the pilgrimage out of devotion, as did many

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