Andreas Vesalius The Father Of Human Anatomy

This new age of anatomical research led to advancements in the knowledge of the human body. Andreas Vesalius fueled the fire with his discoveries and changed the way people viewed anatomy. Some of his contradictory discoveries included:

Vesalius published the book De humani corporis fabrica. (On The fabric of the human body.)

Paracelsus ( 1493- September 25, 1541) - Paracelsus was a firm believer that God provided a remedy for every disease . Eventually he started studying inorganic compounds rather than the usual herbs. He also studied silicosis and tuberculosis in miners, one of the first occupational studies. He also started to look for outside agents for the causes of the disease and finding a new way to cure it rather than bloodletting. Andreas Vesalius and Leonardo Da Vinci would

William Harvey published the book called “An Anatomical Account of the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals” which was officially published a fair time after the other two’s books. He proved that the heart acts as a pump by recirculating the blood, and showed that the blood flows around the body and is carried away by the arteries and is carried back into the heart by the veins. This had a limited impact because likewise to Vesalius, it did not make anyone healthier at the time, and it made more of a long term impact on medicine. He had not found a way to practically cure people because he had just made a book to further people’s knowledge on how the body works. Although his book is very useful for us nowadays, at the time people would not know how to approach it, and really wouldn’t make much of an impact on the people’s health.

Dissection of human bodies became popular during the Renaissance time as people started to redraw and disprove previous beliefs about human anatomy. Interest in anatomy grew for artistic and medicinal purposes. Artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo began “integrating their knowledge of surface and deeper anatomy into their paintings” (Wear). However, the majority of anatomical knowledge at this time was based on Greek and Medieval Italian dissection of animals (Ghosh). Comparing animal bodies to the human body provided its’ inconsistencies, and anatomists like Andreas Vesalius pointed them out and disproved what was considered factual. His studies inspired scientists years to come to venture into anatomy and dissection as well.

Leonardo da Vinci was employed by the Sforza family where he worked for them as their architecture and military advisor as well as a painter and sculptor. After working with the Sforza family for many years, da Vinci carried on with his life, bouncing back and forth between working as an artist and as an inventor. In his late years, da Vinci found that his curiosity led him to study the mechanics behind the human body. By dissecting and observing the human body, he was able to understand many mysteries of the human body; he was even able to make the discovery that the human heart has four chambers instead of two. His famous sketch of the “Vitruvian Man” depicted the anatomy of the human.

Andreas Vesalius, Flemish Anatomist and Physician, was born on 1514 in Brussels (currently Belgium) during the reign of the Roman Empire. He was the legacy of many physicians including his father and grandfather, who serviced the Roman Emperor. Vesalius was a student in the University of Louvain and the University of Paris, where he studied medicine. He spent his time comparing Greek documents with Arabic translations and wrote a thesis on the work of Islamic physician and surgeon, Al Razi. Shortly after he received a degree from University of Padua in 1537, immediately then he got assigned as chair of surgery and anatomy. He is best known as the founder and father of the modern science of anatomy. His first Anatomy text book was based on the human dissections he made himself.

During the Scientific Revolution scientists created many new discoveries. For example, the better understanding of the human body and the way it works, and the invention of many instruments used for medical purposes. Many discoveries and inventions helped to start the advancement in the medical field. During the Scientific Revolution there was a brilliant physician named Andreas Vesalius, who was often known as the founder of the human anatomy. Now around the time, the dissection of a human body had only just became an acceptable practice. Vesalius took advantage of the practice and before the 16th century and he would steal the corpses of criminals that had been hung and he would dissect them to analyze the structure of the human body (BrainBlogger).

The Classical period of Ancient Greece produced some of the most beautiful and intensely felt sculptures ever. The sculptures of this time period are characterized by a freedom of movement and a freedom of expression. Of the many notable works there is one that every college student should understand, the Discobolus by Myron, or the Discus Thrower. This sculpture celebrates the style of the time period like no other. “The best example showing freedom of movement is the Discobolos (The Discus Thrower) by Myron in the Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome.”

Giovanni Morgagni’s approach to anatomy was through looking at the bodily changes caused by disease, but on the post mortem side of the spectrum. He looked at the anatomy of the body during autopsies of people who had died from an illness or disease. By performing autopsies, Morgagni made several discoveries that changed the science of anatomy. He performed over 700

How far did health and medicine improve during the Renaissance?’ Introduction Health and medicine changed considerably during the Renaissance in some areas and in some areas it remained the same. Major changes were seen in the fields of anatomy and surgery, as seen in the published works of Vesalius, Leonardo Da Vinci and William Harvey. But there was not much improvement when it came to cures and treatments and also finding out the causes of diseases.

Andreas Vesalius, a Belgian physician, is known as the founder of human anatomy for revolutionizing medicine and biology through his findings of the anatomy of the human body. From 1533 to 1536, Vesalius studied at the University of Paris. There, he learned to dissect animals and obtained many human corpses to dissect too. He devoted most of his time to studying human bones, plentiful in cemeteries throughout Paris. At the time, Vesalius relied on the theories of Galen, a Greek physician, until he realized that the books on anatomy that were written by Galen were based on the dissections of animals, not humans. Vesalius’s book on anatomy, commonly known as the Fabrica, was printed in 1543. This book became widely known, detailing and teaching

When one examines his Vitruvian Man, we see his studies in proportion. As theorised by the Roman Architect Vitruvius, described loosely, the navel is the center of the human body, and can be depicted inscribed in a circle touched by the fingers and toes, and also inscribed within a square. Previous versions were often not anatomically correct, and often misrepresenting the proportions, for example making the man’s torso too small in relation to the rest of the body, making him seem unnatural. The Vitruvian Man is Leonardo’s depiction of the proportionately perfect human, and by studying the human body again and again, he noticed on average, ‘the space between the slit of the mouth and the base of the nose will be a third of the face,’ and,

For example, in 1596, when trying to prove the workings of the solar system, Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer, explained, “If we do not confirm the thesis, then all our previous effects have doubtless been in vain”(Kepler). The idea that one should logically think about and understand why things happen was revolutionary. It was pointless that people assumed things before verifying that their assumption was factual.Reasoning and understanding all areas of life in depth led to an educated population that was the renaissance. Similarly, Leonardo da Vinci, a scientist, and artist, sketched the skeletal and muscular system of the human body for Queen Elizabeth II (da Vinci). His sketches exhibited how to human body worked the way it did by providing visuals and explanations for each body part. He knew the internal structure of humans because at this time many scientists, such as Herophilus, had begun to dissect the bodies of the dead as opposed to animals. The dissection of humans revolutionized the scientific world. Because of the abundance of improvements, people viewed themselves intellectually and artistically superior to those of the Middle ages due to their adoption of

At the age of 38, Leonardo started to conduct extensive studies on the human eyes and it was also his early studies on optics that led him to pursue the field of anatomy. Being a successful artist earned him the right to dissect human corpses at various hospitals in Florence as well as Milan. With this advantage, Leonardo became the first anatomist to create anatomical portraits of the human body. His illustrations of human’s as well as other animals’ anatomy and physiology showed not only the appearance but also the functions of the parts that were illustrated. Most if not all of his sketches were incredibly accurate and identical to the ones that scientists use today.