Like many other Renaissance physicians and artists, Andreas Vesalius was driven by a desire to know the human body in all its parts and aspects. An irresistible urge to dissect had mastered him even as a child, periodically leaving in its wake a succession of dismembered neighborhood dogs, cats, mice, and moles that had succumbed to his curiosity. The son of a court apothecary, Vesalius was born in Brussels, and sent to Paris to study medicine. Once there, however, he was greatly disappointed to find that his anatomy teachers were content to expound on Galen while poking around in the bodies of dead dogs. Having reappeared at the beginning of the fourteenth century in Bologna, the practice of dissecting human bodies was spreading; more and more authorities began placing the corpses of executed criminals at the disposal of universities. Searching for more rigorous training in anatomy, Vesalius left Paris and returned to Brussels, where, risking imprisonment, he stole a body from the gallows to acquire a complete human skeleton. Next, Vesalius moved on to the University of Padua, where he received his medical degree in 1537 and was appointed professor of surgery and anatomy. Here, as elsewhere, anatomical demonstrations were highly ritualized events, with the professor seated above the corpse reading from a Galenic text, the surgeon dissecting, and the demonstrator pointing to the indicated parts of the body. Not content with this division of labor, Vesalius took scalpel in hand, with the result that he soon proved many of Galen’s centuries-old observations to be false. Because it was still unthinkable to dispute Galen’s claims, however, discrepancies between what was seen in the sixteenth-century corpse and what was written in the second-century text were ascribed to the "fact" that the human body had changed since antiquity. Vesalius offered another explanation: He was certain that Galen, in most cases, had dissected not human bodies but those of monkeys, goats, and pigs. Setting out to portray a true picture of the human anatomy, Vesalius published the results of his anatomical work in De Humanis Corporis Fabrica, Libri Septem (1543), one of the most important of the early generation of printed books. Containing 663 folio pages and more than three hundred illustrations by the painter Jan Stefan von Kalkar, the great treatise appeared in the same year that Copernicus redrew the anatomy of the heavens
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