CORPSE DOCTOR ANDREAS VESALIUS FINDS ADAM’S RIB

SHOWMAN SURGEON PROVIDES PROOF

1539

Padua, Italy

 

Andreas Vesalius, the show-off surgeon, found Adam’s lost rib today.

And he did it in front of an audience. Of course.

This is the man who set up his own surgery theater, complete with a circular second story balcony which allows viewers to “look over his shoulder” as he performs surgeries and dissections.

(The dissections are much more popular than the surgeries.)

The purpose of the operating theater is ostensibly to teach anatomy to his medical students, but the doctors-to-be are forced to jostle and elbow for seats among the local townspeople eager to take in the riveting performances.

Now, it’s common knowledge that, because of Adam’s sacrifice in the Garden of Eden, men have one less rib than women. It’s in the Bible, after all. But no one ever thought of publicly counting them.

Today, before another packed house, Dr. Vesalius outdid himself as a doctor and a performer when he opened up a male corpse and loudly counted the ribs.

All the theater-goers were on the edge of their balcony seats, waiting for the final number.

Twelve on one side.

Twelve on the other side!

24. The same number of ribs a woman has.

Always playing to the crowd, he made a show of checking the cadaver’s heart, announcing that, yes, it was smaller than a woman’s.

 

But seriously…

 

May 5th, 2022

 

Andreas Vesalius was a showman.

His flamboyant methods of teaching garnered him enemies among his teachers, his fellow doctors, and in the world of publishing.

But he was also a serious anatomist. Born in 1514 in Brussels, his real name was Andries van Wesel, but he adopted a Latinized name, Latin being the language of higher learning.

He was the son and grandson of physicians, but his medical inspiration came from ancient Greece.

 

Galen

For fourteen centuries, everybody trusted the Greek physician Galen when it came to anatomy. He was known as the father of anatomy, the Prince of Physicians. His authority was unchallenged.

The knowledge he passed on to Medieval Europe was gained through rigorous study of cadavers, made possible because he pioneered the practice of dissection: cutting up a dead body in order to learn about its parts.

Vesalius studied Galen rigorously, even editing his writings as part of a new translation. In so doing, he realized that no one had really followed Galen’s system. He decided to learn anatomy the way Galen had proposed, as Galen himself had, through dissection.

In fact, he did Galen better than Galen. Because while Galen used animals in his dissections, Vesalius was determined to learn from human cadavers.

 

The Innocents and the Guilty

While a medical student in Paris, Vesalius haunted the Cemetery of the Innocents, scrounging for corpses or parts of corpses.

He would collect the bones of a dead man, whisk them home, and reassemble them into a skeleton. He had to brave being attacked by fierce dogs that roamed the graveyard. He also had to keep his activities a secret. As a medical student he couldn’t be seen robbing graves.

Dissections were limited to the bodies of executed criminals. The body of a man who was hanged would be intact. But young Andreas took it one step further, recovering the skeleton of a man who had been burned at the stake. He carried two human skeletons with him throughout his life, using them in his demonstrations.

 

Show and Tell

Vesalius attended the University of Padua- the place to be for an anatomist. After graduating with a medical degree at age 22, he was immediately made professor of anatomy and surgery. He was such a quick study, he was asked to take charge of the third anatomy he witnessed. He became the most accomplished anatomist since the ancient Greeks- and a popular lecturer.

His lectures were so popular that he was invited by the students at the University of Bologna to lecture. In Bologna, as in Padua, the students still held the right to organized dissections, a holdover from its origin as a student-run university.

On January 15, 1540, Vesalius put on a show in Bologna. He brought his own articulated skeleton, and a spare, and that of a monkey. (This was the first time human and ape skeletons were seen side by side in a classroom.) Also on display were 3 human bodies, and the corpses of six dogs and other animals. The dissection was held in the church of San Francesco, with four tiers of benches encircling the dissection table, so that nearly 200 people could view.

At that time, medical students learned anatomy according to a strict formula. They would gather (often in a church, the dissection being performed on the altar) to listen to the professor, who sat in a high chair called a cathedra, behind the cadaver. The professor would teach from his perch, while a student, known as the archidiaconus studentium (archdeacon of students), usually a bachelor of medicine who was chosen by the other students, performed the anatomy. The student would follow the professor’s lecture, repeating it in Latin, showing on the corpse what the professor was teaching.

So, a popular and dynamic lecturer is invited by the students, who were expecting to be entertained and taught. But tradition demanded that he follow the lead of the professor. In Bologna, that was the esteemed 65-year-old Professor Matthaeus Curtius (Matteo Corte).

The 25-year-old Vesalius chose not to follow protocol; instead of repeating the professor’s lecture, he launched into his own. He pointed out the two long muscles along the length of the belly, explaining where they met.

Humiliated by the lack of deference, and outraged that Galen was being questioned, Curtius reproved the young man, explaining that he was teaching something different than what Galen had taught .

Vesalius then did the unthinkable: he publicly challenged Galen.

“Even if Galen says that, yet we shall demonstrate here that in fact it is not so.”

 

Reluctant Iconoclast

The outraged doctors who walked out of that dissection represented the view of medical science of that day: Galen can’t be wrong.

Vesalius did the unthinkable, by challenging the unchallengeable; but he wasn’t looking to take down Galen.

The problem was, Galen’s knowledge of anatomy was derived from the dissection of apes, not humans. Vesalius, by dissecting human cadavers, had learned some things that Galen didn’t know.

The irony was, he only came to this conclusion after rigorously following Galen’s process, something no one else- for all their reverence for the ancient doctor- had attempted.

His discovery inspired a “pamphlet war” with his former teacher Sylvius, each attacking the other in the form of short, hastily printed broadsides, over whether Galen had dissected humans.

Sylvius went so far as to claim that the human body had changed over the centuries. The student won the argument when, in 1506, the statue of Laocoon and his two sons (famous anciently for its perfection in executing the form of the human body) was discovered, proving that the human body had not changed.

 

Adam’s Rib

Just as Vesalius wasn’t eager to take down Galen, he didn’t want to challenge the Christian belief that men had one less rib than women, even though he had proven that belief wrong.

In an uncharacteristically diplomatic moment, he offered a solution:

“Perhaps Adam’s bones, had someone articulated them into a skeleton, might have lacked a rib on one side”.

 

Draw Me a Picture

Vesalius became involved in another great medical controversy: the proper method of bloodletting. Two camps were formed- those who followed what they believed the ancient Greeks had taught, the those who followed the Arabs(who had restored much of the lost medical knowledge of the Classical period), based on their translations from the Greek.

Arguments were offered on both sides that were complicated, heated, and far-fetched. One belief was that blood needed to be drawn from the big toe.

In the midst of this furor, Veselius drew a picture. Of a vein.

That picture didn’t end the controversy, but it began the practice of illustrating the human body for the purpose of learning.

In 1538 Vesalius published Tabulae anatomicae sex (The Six Anatomical Tables), showing six detailed anatomical drawings. It was so popular it inspired numerous plagiarists, whom Vesalius battled for years.

Then in 1543 he published De Humani Corporis Fabrica, (The Fabrica), a comprehensive illustrated anatomical primer- known as “the first atlas of anatomy”.

Vesalius was a talented illustrator, but he had help. He was in contact with the studio of Titian, and some believed that Titian illustrated the Fabrica. The drawings, at least those of the skeletons, seem to have come from Joannes Stephanus of Calcar, who was studying in Venice as a pupil of Titian.

 

The Other Columbus

Vesalius’s legacy could be seen in the fact that within a few years there were full professors of anatomy in all the best medical facilities in Europe, and Padua built a new anatomical theater in 1584, and another in 1594, which is still standing.

But his legacy took human shape in the person of Matteo Realdo Colombo, student and later his successor as professor of anatomy at Padua. Like Vesalius, he is known by his Latinized name, Realdus Columbus.

Also like Vesalius, he collaborated with a Master painter. As Vesalius had Titian, Columbus had Michelangelo. They planned to collaborate on a book about Columbus’s discoveries in anatomy: written by Columbus, illustrated by the great painter himself.

He was one of the first to discover the pulmonary transit of the blood. In other words, he figured out that the blood travels through the lungs, where it receives oxygen before passing back into the heart.

He learned this through vivisection.

A book called De Medicina, by an ancient writer named Celsus, was discovered in the 15^th century and printed in 1478 at Florence. Celsus claimed that two men, Herophilus and Erasistratus, working in Alexandria before the time of Galen, engaged in vivisection of living criminals who had been released from prison.

Vivisection is the anatomizing – cutting open- of a living body. Columbus, inspired by Celsus, decided to do for the living body what Vesalius had done for the human corpse. He performed vivisections to discover the actions of the body parts, not just the individual parts.

(Vesalius had, on at least one occasion, performed a vivisection on a dog, cutting his vocal cords in stages to demonstrate the effect on its voice.)

Another thing he had in common with Vesalius: he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind, and claim that a giant of the past had been wrong.

On Galen:

“Since he cut up apes and dog-faced baboons in place of human bodies, Galen’s books on anatomy cannot but abound with many errors.”

It’s one thing to attack a man who has been dead for centuries; it’s another to impugn the reputation of your mentor while he’s still alive and working.

It took 1,400 years to topple Galen from his pedestal. Vesalius was badmouthed by his own student as soon as he left town.

When Vesalius returned to Padua as a visitor, Columbus went into hiding, presumably to avoid becoming one of his former teacher’s cadavers.

Andreas Vesalius was a Renaissance Man, sparking a revolution in medicine. Professor, lecturer, anatomist, showman, illustrator, iconoclast, polemicist, royal physician, and, finally, pilgrim. He died returning from a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre.

He deserves to be more famous than he is, for what he taught the world, and how he taught it.

 

Sources

Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514-1564, Charles Donald O’Malley

The Anatomical Renaissance, the Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients, Andrew Cunningham

Andreas Vesalius, The reformer of anatomy, James Moores Ball