Historical Context: The Renaissance, Humanism and the Birth of Modern Anatomy

The Renaissance and Humanism

The Fabrica was written and published at the height of the Renaissance, in the early 1540s. It is a spectacular example of Renaissance scholarship and art that exemplifies the ideals of the age. While too extraordinary to be called typical, every aspect from the subject matter to the language used to the quality of the production speak to the work's historical moment.

The Renaissance was both an historical age and a cultural movement. It marks the period of transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity and was characterized by a particular attitude towards learning and intellectual pursuit. Renaissance means rebirth in French and this time saw the cultural rebirth of Europe. During the Middle Ages, because of the primacy of the Church, scholarship, and learning in general, had turned away from the secular. The works of many ancient Greek and Roman scholars had fallen to the wayside. The Renaissance revived interest in Classical learning and sources, which in turn prompted its own great explosion of original scholarly and artistic output.

At the heart of this cultural movement was the philosophy of Humanism, which sought to create an informed, enlightened citizenry by encouraging education, in particular the study of the humanities. Out of Humanism came the now familiar concept of the “Renaissance Man,” a person who is well-educated with a broad base of general knowledge and expertise across a number of disciplines and who is relentlessly self-improving. Vesalius was reared and educated in the Humanist tradition and the Fabrica is, as this book study will demonstrate, a decidedly Humanist work, written in a Humanist style, by a Renaissance man and marketed to other Renaissance men or aspiring Renaissance men.

Anatomy Pre-Vesalius


At the time Vesalius wrote the Fabrica, the supreme authority in the study of human anatomy was Galen, a Greek physician who lived in the 2nd century AD. Although centuries had passed since Galen had written his major anatomical text Anatomical Procedures, his description of the human body was considered definitive. Galen's authority was curious as he lived in a time when human dissection was prohibited so his work is based primarily on the dissection of animals, supplemented by the study of human skeletons and the brief glimpses he had of human internal structures from his work as a physician (O'Malley, 1964).

By the time Vesalius was studying medicine in the 1530s, dissection was still a relatively infrequent occurrence. Knowledge of anatomy was required to earn a medical degree, but it was learned mainly through lecture, textbooks and study of bones. Dissection was considered a surgeon's tool and surgeons at this time had a poor reputation as mere technicians rather than true scholars. While Vesalius was studying at the University of Paris, he may have seen three or four human dissections at the most (Saunders & O'Malley, 1950).

Dissection had not been outlawed outright during the Middle Ages as it had been by the Romans, but the practice was socially unacceptable and frowned upon by the Church. By the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, dissection happened on occasion but cadavers were hard to come by and the practice was not part of formal medical education or viewed as an avenue for new discovery. Rather, it was a means to experience firsthand what Galen and other early physicians had described in their anatomies (O'Malley, 1964). If discrepancies were discovered in the process, it was put down to poor translations of the original works or corrupted versions of texts (Nutton, 2003). Rather than challenging these classical scholars, Renaissance scholars sought purer texts.

It wasn't until 1514 that Galen's works were translated directly from the Greek (Saunders & O'Malley, 1950). The publication prompted renewed interest in anatomy and by the 1520s more and more universities were incorporating dissection into their medical programs. More direct translations of classical medical texts followed, but it is perhaps this first landmark translation that paved the way for Vesalius's Fabrica.

Image of Galen a lithograph by Pierre Roche Vigneron. (Paris: Lith de Gregoire et Deneux, ca. 1865).