Renaissance Lives Andreas Vesalius

In 1543 the young and ambitious physician Andreas Vesalius published what became the most famous book in the history of medicine, On the Fabric of the Human Body. While we tend to think of dissection as a form of destroying the body, Vesalius believed that it helped establish how the human body was constructed. Sachiko Kusukawa shows how Vesalius’s book presented this view through innovative use of Renaissance art, printing technology and the classical tradition. She replaces the conventional view of Vesalius as a proto-modern, anti-authoritarian father of anatomy with a more nuanced account of how Vesalius exploited cultural and technological developments to create an astounding, beautiful book that propelled him to the post of imperial physician and secured his enduring fame.