SoylentNews

Sex, Religion and a Towering Treatise on Anatomy

posted by chromas on Friday August 24 2018, @06:56PM   
from the modesty-apron dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

The Renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica ('On the fabric of the human body') is a foundational work of medicine in the West. Its more than 200 woodcuts revolutionized how people pictured the human body, flayed and cut to reveal musculature, nerves, organs and bones. Even now, 475 years after it was first published, the bold images of skeletons and skinless 'muscle men' in sinuous poses (by illustrator Jan Steven van Calcar) beguile.

More than 700 copies survive from the 1543 and 1555 editions, which Vesalius supervised. Of these, roughly two-thirds contain comments in the margins, bizarre doodles, and coloured-in and even defaced images, as we reveal in our book The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius. Early readers, on evidence, studied Vesalius's treatise diligently, yet had no compunction about scribbling in a hugely expensive volume.

Looking deeper, the marginalia tell two stories. One is that some found the images baffling, and attempted to clarify them in innovative ways. Another is that the pious found the figures' necessary nudity scandalous, and felt impelled to weigh in with ink and scissors. Our study of the reactions of hundreds of readers has taught us that medical communities do not always adopt innovative solutions quickly, even when they are presented in such an elegant format as the Fabrica. It takes time to get used to novelty. And we have learnt that even the most ingenious scientific minds can fail to predict how political and religious institutions will respond to their work.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05941-0

---

Original Submission

• Consensus on # of liver lobes Consensus on # of liver lobes (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @08:31PM (2 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @08:31PM (#726010)

  According to the Hippocratic Collections the liver had five lobes. This concept was adopted by Galen and also became the concept of the medival physicians and teachers of anatomy. Still in his Tabulae Anatomicae from 1538, Andreas Vesalius illustrated the liver with five lobes, but in his public anatomy at Bologna in 1540 and in his famous books Fabrica and Epitome, both published in 1543, he stated that no such lobes existed in the human liver. The old view was based on animal dissections; thus in e.g. dog, cat, rabbit, swine and monkeys the liver has five or four distinct lobes. As a matter of fact the crucial question is not why, in a culture forbidding opening and dissection of human bodies, the on animals based concept, that the liver was split into five lobes, could arise and be maintained. The intriguing question is why the human liver still was said to have five lobes for more than 200 years after human autopsies had started. It is likely that the lag was partly due to belief in the ancient authorities and partly due to the fact that human anatomies were rare and most of the practical anatomy was still performed an animals.

  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18548944 [nih.gov]

  Reliance on "consensus" can hold back science for hundreds of years.

• Re:Consensus on # of liver lobes Re:Consensus on # of liver lobes (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @08:49PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @08:49PM (#726018)

  Not a single mention of consensus in that article summary. Methinks you are trying to make an "alternate" "point"?

  What holds science back are the defenders of the status quo who reject new ideas as preposterous. It is dangerous to toss out ideas without any real consideration.

  Parent

  • Re:Consensus on # of liver lobes (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @09:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @09:00PM (#726023)

    It is likely that the lag was partly due to belief in the ancient authorities

    Uniform belief in the same authorities is "consensus".

    Parent