This guy is holding a knife and his own skin. One of the characteristics of Vesalius's drawings is that he usually drew the bodies as if they were alive. This is one of my favorites.
Here we've got a front and a back. Part of the amazing thing about this drawings is their detail. Coupled with the intricate details was the fact that a detailed picture could be copied exactly by making engravings. Dissemination of such detailed pictures and consistency in them would not have been possible without the press.
In Vesalius's time, it was frowned upon to dissect the human body. He had to find cadavers of prisoners and dissect them in secret so that we could get these beautiful drawings.
These are some strange poses. They remind me of when I went to the BodyWorlds exhibit a few years ago in Salt Lake. They tried to pose the plasticized bodies in action poses to show the way the muscles worked and show that they are actually useful even though we are looking at a lifeless body. Anatomy drawing was truly an art. Not only was Vesalius a great scientist, he was a skilled artist to be able to draw the parts of the body with such precision.
Hope you all enjoyed these drawings as much as I did. If not, then I hope that your doctor enjoys them so he can fix you next time you are broken.
Haha I hope my doctor knows a little bit about the body already so he can fix me! But very interesting about the body and written knowledge. I'm glad that science and medicine were able to become more universal through the means of printing.
ReplyDeleteWow way to follow up on the previous post. I was really impressed with the pictures you were able to find. I hope that my doctor will have more complete anatomical drawings than these though, you know, the next time he operates.
ReplyDeleteI would be interested in knowing how Kosher this book was. You hear about the grave robbing for scientific purposes and how they always had to be very sneaky so they didn't get caught. Was it dangerous for him to write this book?
i would think so, but by this time maybe the scientific community just looked the other way. I mean, Mike said he did it in secret and only used prisoners, so they probably just pretended ignorance about how the drawings became so accurate and just used the information.
ReplyDeleteI never thought about it before, how engravings allowed the pictures to be reproduced exactly. With that much detail it would have taken forever to draw all of those in one book, not to mention hundreds. And you would have had to find skilled artists to do it, if you wanted it to look exactly right. Visual knowledge really increased because of printing, I am coming to conclude. Things that need diagrams or pictures to help make sense of the text, and that is a lot of science. The print revolution has some kind of causal relationship with the scientific revolution. Great post Mike. I enjoyed the pictures.