Draft of "Vesalius and the Press"

Hey guys.  I am posting this draft as a google doc.  Anyone can edit the document but please don't just delete things or I won't notice you did that, also make all comments with a different color of text please so they are easy to find.  Some questions I have are: does the intro sound too cheesy? Does my argument make sense and is it cohesive or does it sound too superficial?  I am still planning on putting a opposing viewpoint part in the conclusion paragraph or its own paragraph before it.  Any comments would be GREATLY appreciated.  (I realize that I did not put the citations at the bottom but I am going to work out the citations and formatting tomorrow)

Here's the LINK

Thanks

Frustration

So I have been in the library for a few hours and realized why I am not a history major.  History essays are really hard for me to write.  I feel like in other subjects you have to understand a concept pretty well to write an essay but for history you have to do 3 times as much research.  I am still trying to formulate my thesis statement.  I am thinking of doing something about either Vesalius that I referenced in my last blog post or maybe I will talk about the resurgence of popularity of the texts of the ancient Greek philosopher and physician Galen.  Or maybe both of them.  I am still figuring everything out.  Hopefully I will get it all figured out soon to post a thesis statement up here and get my draft done for tomorrow.  Otherwise it will be a late night.  Any insight would be much appreciated.

On the Fabric of the Human Body

Who has ever heard of Andreas Vesalius?  Most of you probably haven't.  But I am sure that every one of you has benefited from his work.  While I was doing research last week for my annotated bibliography on print and medical knowledge, I ran across a lot of information on this guy, Andreas Vesalius.  Vesalius is known as the father of modern anatomy and was able to make such a huge impact on our modern knowledge of the human body specifically because of the printing press.  Vesalius published his great work De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the fabric of the human body) almost a hundred years after the Gutenberg's invention of the printing press but it still was a huge step forward for the medical revolution.  I was pretty impressed by all of the pictures that were printed in his book, so I wanted to post a number of them here to show the great detail and complexity of the body that the printing press allowed Vesalius to show the world.

Print and its Effects on Medical Advances

(So according to some suggestions by our professor I'm adding this note.  This post is part of my ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY assignment.  The bibliography is below the page break and is about THE EFFECTS OF PRINT ON MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE.)

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Venturing into the strange world physical research in a library with actual books, moving bookshelves, and code-like numbers on the sides of these books can be a pretty scary task for today's college student.  I probably do about one or two research assignments in the library each semester, but I swear that each time a have I have to again overcome my fear of doing research and actual physical movement at once.  I also have to relearn how to look stuff up there every time I try to use the numbering system, which reminds me of the library card song from Arthur - An integral part of my childhood.  Please enjoy:

"Who's Dewey?": one of those questions we will never know the answer to. . . or maybe we could look him up on wikipedia.  Anyway, after getting reacquainted with the cataloguing system again, (which is actually not the Dewey Decimal System in the HBLL) I started to search for books that teach about how the printing press affected medicine.  So here it is:

¿Which Doctor?

Even though we usually think of medicine as a "science" and as something that should be standard, medicinal practices vary from culture to culture and even from family to family.  All of us inherit beliefs from our parents about what causes what illnesses and what to do to cure them.  In my family, for example, my parents taught  me from a young age to always wash my hands to kill germs, which are a main cause of disease.  They taught me that we should cook our food well to prevent it.  That to cure a sickness the best thing is rest and to be well hydrated.  When we are sick our have a surgery there is always ice cream.  I vividly remember sucking on mickey mouse popsicles when I got my tonsils out as a child.