VESALIIIS, ANDREW, the celebrated anatomist, was a native of Brussels, where he was born in 1514. Ile studied classics at Louvain, and anatomy and medicine first at Colog,ne, then at Montpellier, and finally at Paris, where his preceptors were Gunther, Sylvius, and Fernelius. So keen was his love of dissection that, in order to procure subjects (at that time no easy matter), lie ran considerable risks at the hands of. the municipal authorities. Driven from Paris by the outbreak of war between Francis I. and Charles V., he returned to the Low Countries, where he served as physician and surgeon in the imperial army from 1535 to 1537. In 1539 lie went by invitation to Pavia, where he taught anatomy till 1543. From Pavia he went, again as a lecturer in anatomy, to Bologna and Pisa; and in 1544 was made physician-iu-chief to Charles V. at Madrid, where he continued mainly to reside. He was now at the zenith of his prosperity, When an accident befell him which brought his career to a premature and disastrous close. A Spanish gentleman died in 1564, and permission to dissect the body was granted by his relatives to Vesalius. Life, however, was ascertained to be not quite extinct when,Vesalius began the operation, the heart being found still palpitating. The family of the deceased, with inconsiderate vindictiveness, arraigned Vesalius before the inquisition, by which tribunal some terrible sentence would have been passed upon him, but for the interposition of Philip II., who procured for the unfortunate anatomist the milder penalty of an injunction to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Vesalius, accordingly, in the train of the Venetian general Malateste, proceeded to Cyprus, and thence to Jerusalem. While sojourning in that city, lie was invited to occupy the chair of anatomy, just vacated in Padua by Fallopius. It is supposed that, in compliance
with this invitation, he embarked for Europe; but the ship in which he sailed was wrecked on the shore of Zante. Hunger and misery of mind proved too much for him, and lie died in a village of that island in 1564.
Vesalius was one of those men of science who contributed to disenthral the minds of his contemporaries from their servile belief in the ancients. Galen was then to anatomy what Aristotle was to logical method; and Vesalius assailed his authority by independ ent researches into nature. His first great publication was a series of anatomical tables entitled &arum Librorum de Corports Humani Anatome Epitome (Basel, 1542, fol.). The plates, from drawings by the best masters, and engraved on wood, were nearly all re-incorporated in his great work De Corporitt Humani Fabriea Libsi Septem (Basel, 1543). Great value is placed on the earliest impressions of these plates, the explanations of which, however, were revised by Vesalius in his second (Basel) edition in 1555. He published in 1546 his severe attack on the errors of Galen's anatomy, the well-known De Radieis Chinas usu Epiatola. The cause of Galen was then espoused by Galen's disciple Fallopius, to whom Vesalius replied in his trenchant Anatomicarunt Gabrielis Fallopa Obserrationum Examen (1561). After his death, a work entitled Cldrurgia Magna, published under his name, but really a compilation from the ancient anatomists, was edited by his disciple Borgarucci. Toe great edition of Vesalius's works appeared with fine plates at Leyden in 1725, 2 vols. fol., under the superintendence of Boerhaave and Al binus.