A revisionist biography of Andreas Vesalius—the father of modern anatomy—as deeply shaped by Renaissance culture.
 
In 1543 the young and ambitious physician Andreas Vesalius published one of the most famous books in the history of medicine, On the Fabric of the Human Body. While we often think of dissection as destroying the body, Vesalius believed that it helped him understand how to construct the human body. In this book, Sachiko Kusukawa shows how Vesalius’s publication emerged from the interplay of Renaissance art, printing technology, and classical tradition. She challenges the conventional view of Vesalius as a proto-modern, anti-authoritarian father of anatomy through a more nuanced account of how Vesalius exploited cultural and technological developments to create a big and beautiful book that propelled him into imperial circles and secured his enduring fame.

Sachiko Kusukawa is professor of the history of science at the University of Cambridge. Her books include Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany, which won the Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society.

Introduction
1 Learned Medicine and Its Books
2 Books and Careers
3 Vesalius and the World of Books
4 The Making of the Book: The Printer and the Author
5 The Human Figure: Art and Anatomy
6 Theatre
7 The Bodies in the Book
8 Vesalius: Surgeon, Anatomist, Physician?
9 Making and Unmaking
10 After Fabrica


Chronology
References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index