1543

Publication of Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (On the Fabric of the Human Body), which “helped overthrow the stifling dogma of Galenism by promoting the accurate study of the human body. First time accurate anatomical drawings integrated with written text (Rutkow, 57, 61). The folio was printed in Basel by Johannes Oporinus in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and included fold-out pages for large illustrations. The novelty and impact of the book “were due mainly to Vesalius’s recognition that proper instruction in anatomy demanded good diagrams. . . those in Vesalius’s [presumably by members of Titian’s school] book reflected the spirit of the Renaissance artist with their dramatic realism. . . . It was one thing to say Galen was (sometimes) wrong, but illustrations of that fact as finely observed as those in De Fabrica seemed to present an unanswerable case” (Ball, 67-69). Fabrica “was the definitive break from old models of anatomy by Galen, and the gold standard for a new kind of anatomical study based on observing the body as it really was, not as ancient scholars supposed it to be”(Skuse, 22). Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbitum celestum libri VI also published in 1543.