The Man Who Bared the Brain Alison Abbott Encounters the Discoveries of Renaissance Anatomist Andreas Vesalius

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NEUROPHYSIOLOGY The man who bared the brain Alison Abbott encounters the discoveries of Renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius.

t is only when you read the words that when what he saw contradicted established members of Titian’s Andreas Vesalius wrote as an angry knowledge. We learn his anatomical vocab- workshop to attend young man in the 1540s that you get a ulary. For example, he called the rounded his dissections and Ifeeling for what drove him to document surface protuberances near the brain stem provide the Fabrica’s every scrap of human anatomy his eye could “buttocks” and “testes”; these are now known exceptional illustra- see. His anger was directed at Galen, the as the inferior and superior colliculi, or ‘little tions. In the first two second-century physician whose anatomical hills’, which process sound and vision. volumes, skeletons and teachings had been held as gospel for more We hear Vesalius — who died at 49 in flayed figures pose in than a millennium. Roman Empire law had 1564, the year Galileo was born — berating romantic landscapes barred Galen from dissecting humans, so Galen and his sixteenth-century followers Brain full of classical ico- he had extrapolated as best he could from with unrestrained sarcasm. But we also see Renaissance: nography. Figures in animal dissections — often wrongly. a man not quite prepared to put into plain From Vesalius the other volumes are to Modern Human dissections were also banned in words the theological consequences of some Neuroscience less ornate, but clear most of sixteenth-century Europe, so Vesa- of his discoveries, particularly his failure MARCO CATANI AND and fine. The brain is lius travelled to wherever they were allowed. to find an anatomical explanation for the STEFANO SANDRONE often shown encased He saw Galen’s errors and dared to report ‘human spirit’ in the brain. Oxford Univ. Press: in the skull with the them, most explicitly in his seven-volume Brain Renaissance is not the only English 2015. top removed, revealing De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric translation, but it is the only one available at a cross-sections at dif- of the Human Body), which he began aged 24, price that individuals might afford. Accompa- ferent depths; other images depict individual working with some of the best art profession- nying texts by Catani and Sandrone place the brain structures such as the cerebellum. als of the time. His mission to learn through work in its historical and scientific context; Vesalius’s thinking was as influenced direct and systematic observation marked the a biography of Vesalius is rich in elements by prevailing technologies as ours is, and start of a new way of doing science. familiar to scientists today, such as the fear of as Galen’s was, note Catani and Sandrone. In Brain Renaissance, neuroscientists plagiarism and pernicious academic rivalry. Whereas today we draw on computer and Marco Catani and Stefano Sandrone pre- And a brief final section on the history of social networks for metaphors about brain sent a translation from the Latin of the neuroscience warns against the temptation function, for Vesalius and Galen the tech- Fabrica’s last volume, which focuses on the to move away from direct observation into nology of reference was hydraulics, which brain. Through it we can appreciate Vesa- overly abstract theory. almost miraculously kept the waterways and lius’s extraordinary attention to detail, and Born into a well-to-do Brussels family of plumbing systems of their cities functioning. his willingness to believe his eyes, even physicians and pharmacists, many of whom Both saw the brain in these terms, with the attended royalty, Vesalius studied medicine in functional units being the liquid-containing Paris. When he was 18, his teachers allowed ventricles rather than grey and white mat- him the extraordinary privilege of assisting ter. Galen held that the vivifying force of the in their occasional public dissections of pneuma physicon, or ‘animal spirit’, flowed executed criminals. He continued down through the ventricles, then through his studies in Leuven, now in Bel- hollow nerves to nourish all parts of the gium, where he persuaded the body. Vesalius ruled this out on anatomical mayor to allow human dissec- grounds: he showed that there is no physical tion. On graduation, he was outlet through the skull. But he still searched offered a professorship in for flow routes that would, for example,

anatomy at the University funnel ‘brain phlegm’ into the nostrils. IMAGES CHARMET/BRIDGEMAN ARCHIVES of Padua, Italy — an intel- Vesalius was aware of the value of his work, lectual hotbed politically and of the academic jealousies that could independent of the Pope, work against him. He chose not to use a Vene- PARIS/ DE MÉDECINE, DE LA FACULTÉ BIBLIOTHÈQUE where the practice of tian printer who was producing a rival, Galen- human dissection was based anatomical tome, perhaps because he long established. feared that the printer would deliberately Padua is close delay publication of his own study. Instead he to Venice, which crossed the Alps to Basel, Switzerland, where, was home to still fearing intellectual theft, he stayed to important oversee the printing. He whiled away his time schools of artists. by boiling the body of an executed murderer Vesalius recruited to get at his bones. The reassembled skeleton is still displayed in the city’s university. ■ One of Vesalius’s illustrations of an exposed brain from De Alison Abbott is Nature’s senior European Humani Corporis Fabrica, 1543. correspondent.