Andreas Vesalius Facts
Andreas Vesalius Facts
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| Interesting Andreas Vesalius Facts: |
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| Vesalius was born in Brussels while it was still part of the Netherlands (modern-day Belgium). |
| After studying and completing his education, he was immediately offered the chair of surgery and anatomy at the University of Padua (Padova). |
| In Vesalius' day, there were two factors working against medical discoveries; the first was a comprehensive medical publication by Claudius Galen that was taken as truth for nearly 1,300 years, and the second involved legal and ecclesiastical ramifications of performing autopsies or dissections on human cadavers. |
| He therefore published his own work, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), which remained in high regard for centuries. |
| Much of Vesalius' work was unconsciously and unintentionally aimed at disproving Galen's medical information. |
| This became a focus of Vesalius after discovering that all of Galen's dissections had been performed on animals, and none of the information in his book had been carried out on humans. |
| Some factions of science resented Vesalius for exposing this fact and continued to use the Galen text out of loyalty. |
| Vesalius left teaching and became the court physician to Emperor Charles V, even traveling with him during battles and diplomatic trips. |
| One of Vesalius' chief differences that revolutionized the field of anatomy and therefore medicine was to handle human dissections himself, as opposed to the time-honored practice of having the professor lecture the students while a barber hacked at the body. |
| Through his work, Vesalius was able to uncover a lot of information about the human body and pioneered the field of anatomy. |
| One of his medical innovations was in the common practice of bloodletting, in which he sided with the earlier concept of keeping the incision near the site of the malady as opposed to moving the site far away in order to draw the bad blood through the body. |
| Vesalius made significant and largely correct discoveries pertaining to nearly all of the bodies' systems, as well as to the heart and the brain. |
| It wasn't until much later that Vesalius' studies of the human heart, which he incorrectly thought allowed blood to distill through the septa that divide the chambers, did contribute to the understanding that the heart acted as a pump to move blood. |
| Vesalius died penniless on an island after shipwrecking on his way to the Holy Land. Some detractors claimed that he was going to escape the Inquisition, but this may have been only a rumor to discredit him. |
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