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Seeing Science Colloquium Seeing science. Image, text, and nature 1500-1800 For March 2005, Princeton University Andreas Vesalius and the canonisation of the human body – res, verba, pictura1 Sachiko Kusukawa Trinity College, Cambridge, CB2 1TQ, UK [email protected] Please do not quote without permission I have not included all the pictures I discuss in this paper (I hope to be able to show them in my presentation). The images from the De humani corporis fabrica and the Kaitai Shinsho may readily be found at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/historicalanatomies/browse.html. Introduction My research focuses on the role of images in the formation of learned knowledge of nature in sixteenth-century Europe. Some scholars in the sixteenth century used pictures to create the object of their study which embodied their method, to form and direct an argument, to persuade and win over a witness and to help them in their discovery. In this paper, I focus on some of the functions of the images in Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (On the fabric of the human body), which I believe were central to his intellectual project. Vesalius also used a picture in the dissection hall to establish his own view of the human body there. These Vesalian pictures were received and used in various ways in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; I use an example of a reception in eighteenth-century Japan, to reflect on the complex interrelationship between res, verba, and pictura. 1 A longer version entitled ‘From Counterfeit to Canon: Picturing the human body, especially by Andreas Vesalius’ appeared in 2004 as Preprint 281 from the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, I am grateful to Professor L. Daston for the invitation to the visit that led to very helpful comments from Drs M. Fend, C. Gantet, A. te Heesen and Ms K. Müller. I also benefited from comments by Profs Daston, N. Siraisi and I. Maclean on an earlier version of the paper. 1 De humani corporis fabrica In 1543, the Basle printer Johannes Oporinus (1507-68) printed Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, a book of over 700 folio (c. 43 cm x 29 cm) pages with its companion piece, the Epitome, 30 pages of large anatomical figures (over 56 cm x 40 cm).2 Vesalius called the Epitome an index and ‘pathway’ along the ‘highway’ of the De fabrica, and although it was sought and bought together with the latter, considerably fewer copies of the Epitome have survived, presumably because the pictures in them were cut up and glued together, as they were intended to be.3 The De fabrica contains a title page, a portrait of the author, and over 200 figures, some of them repeated.4 The figures vary in size - from a picture of an ossicle 5 mm across and 7 mm high to the large, full-figure myological portraits taking up a full folio page and the over- size diagrams of blood-vessels and nerves (from the Epitome) inserted at p. 313 and p. 352 respectively, measuring about 56 cm x 40 cm.5 The well-known title page and the author portrait are in many ways a visual manifesto of Vesalius’ project.6 The title page portrays Vesalius at the centre of a theatre teeming with spectators, including the ancients, pointing at a dissected woman’s body, without the traditional accompaniment of the professor in the chair or demonstrators. Traditionally, in a dissection theatre, the text of Galen was read out, while a barber- surgeon cut open the body, and the professor commented on the text, and the 7 demonstrator pointed to the part which was referred in the text. In contrast, Vesalius is 2 Cushing 1962, pp. 80, 112. Vesalius said that the pictures couldn’t be large enough, O’Malley 1964, pp. 293f. 3 O’Malley 1964, p. 184. ‘For the purposes of a beginner, however, one might argue with some justification that the account of the viscera should have accompanied that of the distribution of the vessels, as in my Epitome, a work that I intended as a sort of pathway through these books and an index to the things demonstrated in them…’ Vesalius 1998-, vol. 1, p. lv. 4 Repeats of pictures occur at Vesalius 1543a, pp. 22 and 38; 36 and 47; 48f. and 24; 14 and 67; 277 and 369. 5 Some of the small illustrations may be found at Vesalius 1543a, pp. 94, 99, 125, 143 and 250. For the size of the Epitome, see Cushing 1962, p. 112. 6 Cunningham 1997, pp. 121-128. 7 For reading the traditional public dissection scene as pictured in Johann Ketham’s Fasciculo, see Bylebyl 1990. See Vesalius’ criticism at Vesalius 1998-, vol. I, pp. li, liii. Note that the tri-partite division of labour in public dissections was maintained in Padua, even after Vesalius, Bylebyl 1979, p. 361. 2 depicted as the single person in charge of the dissection: he cuts open the body, he points to what he sees, and he seeks to understand the body as Galen had enjoined others to do. The skeleton above the dissection table draws attention to Vesalius’ emphasis on the Galenic structure of the human body, beginning with the bones, which Galen had likened to the walls of the house. The portrait of the author furthermore represents Vesalius as pursuing a Galenic project by dissecting the hand, ‘the instrument of instruments’, and the instrument, according to Vesalius, physicians have come to neglect.8 The title of the book, De fabrica humani corporis (On the fabric of the human body), was also an indication of the Galenic lineage of the work. De corporis humani fabrica was also the title given to a tract by Theophilus Protospartharius (7th century), translated by Julius Paulus Crassus and published in 1536 (Venice: O. Scotus).9 Theophilus was an author known for his work on the urine and pulse, commonly included in the articella. According to Crassus, the virtue of Theophilus (though Crassus was unsure of his exact dates or life) was that he lived after the time of Galen and was a Christian, and wrote a tract which was much shorter and more succinct than Galen’s De usu partium in seventeen books.10 To Crassus, Theophilus showed how the human body, the container of the soul, was more divine than other animals.11 Indeed, Theophilus’ work viewed the human body as a creation of God, and dealt with the hands, arms and feet (book one), lower venter (book two), middle venter (book three), upper venter (book 8 Cunningham 1997, p. 123. 9 The earliest edition I have seen is Theophilus 1537. 10 ‘Caeterum cum inter Graecos, quos sciretur, nemo post Galenum hunc in philosophia locum artificiose tractavisset, superioribus mensibus liber Theophili Protospartarii de humani corporis apparatu in manus meas inopinato incidit, idque opera Francisci Frigimelij praeceptoris mei, viri omnibus bonis artibus ornatissimi, sed praecipui Hippocratice et Galenicae medicinae illustratoris. Eum cum attentius curiosusque legissem, laetatus plane sum, et librum approbavi: dignum enim doctorum librorum lectione arbitratus sum: nam quicquid ferme septemdecim amplissimis voluminibus de membrorum usu Galenus explicavit, totum id quinque libellis Theophilus comprehendit. Quae sane brevitas neque manca est, neque obscura, aut iniucunda: quem enim Galeni, exuberans copia fatigaverit, hunc Theophili dilucida ordinataque brevitas recreavit.’ Theophilus 1556 aij v. 11 ‘Quantum enim inter homines bestiasque interest, id cuique hominis interiorem formam intuenti lucidissime patebit. Eius vero singularis excllentia, virtus, atque divinitas, ita demum intelligitur, exacteque habebitur, si erit tota humani corporis fabricatio perspecta, omnisque eius figura, atque perfectio: siquidem providens natura omnium parens aequissima, cuique animanti corpus, prout animae dignitas ac vires postulant, elargitur.’ Theophilus 1556, ai vf. 3 four), the spine, male and female generative organs (book five).12 This redacted and Christanised form of Galen’s De usu partium fitted in well with the projects both Jacobus Sylvius (1478-1555) and Johannes Guinther von Andernach (1505-74) were involved in, namely to teach the newly revived Greek medicine in manageable and summarised form: Theophilus’ De corporis humani fabrica was thus included in the 1539 edition Guinther’s Anatomicarum institutionum … libri IIII.13 Thus, in calling his work De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, Vesalius was probably aligning his work along a Christianised Galenic, anatomical work, which he appears to have read.14 Perhaps it is in this spirit that we should understand Vesalius’ gesture of pointing upwards to heaven, to God, in the frontispiece. In the preface to the Emperor in the De fabrica Vesalius conceded that pictures were no replacement for the actual experience of dissecting bodies, and that therefore students should undertake dissections with their own hands, as Galen had entreated.15 Yet Vesalius argued that the use of pictures was a matter of historical necessity, because the ancient practice of oral and first-hand instruction on dissection within households of physicians had long been abandoned.16 Vesalius also stressed the descriptive power of pictures over and above textual explanations: pictures assist understanding of anatomy, for they place the matter (rem) more exactly (exactius) before the eyes than by the most 12 ‘…hominem autem solum manu Dei creatum esse nos docent sacrae literae, aiunt enim hominem finxit glebam terrae capiens, et in faciem ipsius afflavit spiritum vitae, et factus est homo cum anima vivente.’ Theophilus 1537, 9. 13 Guinther 1539, 127-227; Guinther rearranged the numbering of some of the chapters in book one. 14 Vesalius 1998- vol. I, p. liii. 15 ‘I am not unmindful of the opinion of certain people, who strongly deny that even the most exquisite delineations of plants and of parts of the human body should be set before students of the natural world; it takes the view that these things should be learnt, not from pictures but from careful dissection and examination of the actual objects.
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