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Sex, Religion and a Towering Treatise on Anatomy

posted by chromas on Friday August 24 2018, @06:56PM   Printer-friendly
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

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @06:56AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @06:56AM (#726164)

    Yet another problem regarded the number of lobes of the liver. Generally ancient and medieval anatomists found five (the number in a dog). Renaissance anatomists were less sure about this number because increased dissection of human cadavers had suggested alternatives. "It has five lobes, sometimes four and three, sometimes two," wrote Jacopo Berengario da Carpi at the end of the fifteenth century. A few decades later, anatomists were even more skeptical of the five-lobed human liver. It is very rarely divided into five lobes; more frequently into four most frequently into three," wrote Andres de Laguna in 1535. The number that we count today -- two -- seems to have been quite difficult for them to see. Look at the medieval image of the liver to your left. Then look at a Renaissance image of the liver to your right. What differences do you observe?

    https://web.stanford.edu/class/history13/earlysciencelab/body/liverpages/medliver.gif [stanford.edu]
    https://web.stanford.edu/class/history13/earlysciencelab/body/liverpages/largeliver.gif [stanford.edu]

  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday August 27 2018, @09:50PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Monday August 27 2018, @09:50PM (#727149) Journal

    Uh. Four.

    Right. Left. Caudate. Quadrate.

    Even Wikipedia knows that. [wikipedia.org] Though yes I understand right and left are common parlance, and the author's point has merit anyway. But get basics like that wrong and who will read the rest?

    --
    This sig for rent.