>>Dr. Kerry Magruder: Thank you for joining
me in the History of Science Collections of
the University of Oklahoma Libraries. Let's
look at a few treasures from the vault that
throw light on the story of medicine in the
16th century. In the Middle Ages universities
revived the practice of human dissection,
which had been prohibited by the Romans due
to ethical concerns and taboos about contact
with the dead. A profound cultural shift was
occurring, which led to an early modern convergence
between art and anatomy.
The anatomy of Mondino de Luzzi was the standard
medieval manual for human dissection in the
universities. To the modern eye, the most
striking thing about this early edition is
the lack of illustrations. This 1507 edition
reproduces the nature of the manuscript tradition,
before the advent of printing. Yet in 1541
the text of Mondino was reprinted with many
illustrations. We see here not only the increased
use of visual representations resulting from
the printing revolution, but an artistic approach
to human anatomy.
This study of human anatomy was published
in Paris just a few years later by Charles
Estienne, a scholar and a printer. Estienne
obtained some woodblock illustrations from
an obscure artist and converted them to anatomical
illustrations. To show anatomical detail he
cut out little rectangles in the artistic
wood blocks and substituted his own anatomical
detail, almost as if he were using clip art.
If you look closely, you can see the outline
of the rectangular inset within the larger
wooden block.
This book On the Fabric of the Human Body
by Andrea Vesalius is without doubt the most
handsome 16th century anatomical work. The
title page displays Vesalius conducting a
public autopsy on a woman. Perhaps a vivisection
of the dog or monkey will be next. At the
top the initials I.O. stand for Johannes.
The Johannes in question was Vesalius's partner
in producing the work, the artist Jan Stephan
van Calcar, a student of Titian. Jan Stephan
died shortly after the book was published,
and unfortunately his contribution is not
widely appreciated.
Vesalius was fortunate to team up with a world-class
artist. See how even the human skeletons reveal
an aesthetic appreciation of the human body.
This is me giving a lecture, and this is my
students when I attempt to tell a joke. A
dozen muscle men walk through the pages of
Vesalius, removing skin and organs layer by
layer, like discarding old clothes. The landscape
in the background forms a 360-degree panorama
when you put them end-to-end. The naturalistic
effect is remarkable. Although the anatomical
drawings of Estienne were just as accurate
and sometimes more so, these drawings for
Vesalius by van Calcar appear more naturalistic,
and are therefore more believable. But look
at the muscles of the legs. The muscles of
the calves, they're contracted. You don't
see that on a dissecting table, where muscles
are limp. These figures were drawn from life
with the eye of an accomplished artist.
How far we have come from the Roman era taboos
prohibiting physical contact with the dead.
This series of works, from Mondino to Vesalius
represents a new aesthetic toward the human
body. When Phillip Melanchthon was reforming
the curriculum of the universities founded
by the Lutherans during the reformation, he
settled upon the study of Vesalius as the
most suitable replacement for traditional
undergraduate study of Aristotle. Human anatomy
took its place in the common core. Vesalius
was a professor of anatomy at the University
of Padua. But health care practitioners outside
the universities, such as barber surgeons
and apothecaries, also printed medical texts,
often in the vernacular.
This book written in German and published
in 1583 is the first printed work devoted
to diseases of the eye. Georg Bartisch was
a surgeon who specialized in bulbous tumors
of the eye. The work is profusely illustrated
with 88 full-page woodcuts of anatomical features.
Woodcuts depict operations, medical instruments,
and chemical apparatus.
This view of the human skull features five
moveable overlays. When we lift the first
we see the blood vessels supplying the scalp.
Beneath that we see the sutures of the skull.
Within the skull we see the blood vessels
in the dura mater, and then the surface of
the brain itself before finally revealing
the optical pathway beneath. This detailed
rendering of the anatomy of the eye has six
moveable overlays. This would've been very
difficult to do before printing.
150 years later interactive flaps appear throughout
Christoph Hellwig's popular anatomical textbook.
The OU copy contains many pages of handwritten
student notes. Science is a story. What stories
do you want to hear and tell about medieval
and early modern medicine?
