Andreas Vesalius, from the Fabrica (1543), attributed to Jan van Calcar. Source · Public domain
About Andreas Vesalius
Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) was born in Brussels into a family of physicians and apothecaries to the Habsburg court. He studied at Louvain and at Paris, where he learned Galenic anatomy, and took his medical degree at Padua in 1537, where he was at once appointed to teach surgery and anatomy. He published anatomical plates in 1538 and, in 1543, the De humani corporis fabrica with its companion Epitome. Soon afterward he entered imperial service as physician to Charles V and later to Philip II of Spain. He issued a revised Fabrica in 1555 and died in 1564 on the island of Zakynthos while returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Seven Books on the Fabric of the Human Body) was printed at Basel by Johannes Oporinus in 1543, when its author, Andreas Vesalius, professor at Padua, was twenty-eight. Its seven books describe the bones and cartilages, the ligaments and muscles, the veins and arteries, the nerves, the organs of nutrition and generation, the heart and the organs of the chest, and the brain and the senses.
