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Comparative Anatomy: Andreas Vesalius evolution.berkeley.edu http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/print/printable_template.php?article_id=history_02&context=... Comparative Anatomy: Andreas Vesalius At the dawn of the sixteenth century, European scholars could gain only a crude understanding of the anatomy of humans and animals. At the handful of universities where students trained in medicine—such as Bologna or Paris—professors read from the books of the Roman physician Galen. Galen had combined the philosophical work of Aristotle and other Greeks with his own lifetime of dissections, creating a system that explained not just the structure of the human body, but how the body worked. After the fall of Rome, Galen’s legacy lived on in Arab cities like Baghdad, where his work was translated, pored over, and encrusted with interpretations and commentaries. In the 1100s, Europeans began to translate Galen from Arabic and made his work the basis of medical training. But in the many steps of translation, much of the spirit of Galen’s work—especially his emphasis on observing for oneself rather than relying on authority—was lost. A tradition had emerged in which professors read Galen to their students, while a surgeon dissected an executed criminal to show the relevant parts of the body. There was no point in the professor looking for himself at the body, since everything worth learning could be found in Galen’s books. Observing the human body A young Flemish anatomist changed all that when he realized that Galen was dramatically wrong. Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) started out his career as a defender of “Galenism” at the University of Paris. But when he moved to the University of Padua, he began dissecting corpses for himself to show his students the fine details of anatomy. He drew charts for the students to study, and the exquisite quality of the charts made Vesalius famous—so famous that the criminal court judge of Padua made sure he had a steady supply of cadavers from the gallows. As he grew more familiar with the human body, Vesalius began to notice that here and there, Galen had made mistakes. The human breastbone is made of three segments; Galen said seven. Galen claimed that the humerus (the upper arm bone) was the longest bone in the body, save only the femur; Vesalius saw that the tibia and fibula of the shin pushed the humerus to fourth. Over the centuries, anatomists sometimes had minor quibbles with Galen, but Vesalius began to suspect that there was something seriously wrong with his work. Vesalius widened his scope, dissecting animals, and reading over his Galen more carefully. The source of the mistake dawned on him. Galen had never dissected a human. The traditions of Rome did not allow such a practice, and so Galen had had to make do with dissecting animals and examining his patients during surgery. Instead of humans, Galen was often writing about oxen or Barbary macaques. 1 di 2 22/10/2009 10.38 evolution.berkeley.edu http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/print/printable_template.php?article_id=history_02&context=... Vesalius dissects a female Vesalius found that the cadaver in his anatomy lab. human breastbone has three segments, not seven as Galen claimed. Challenging Galenism At age 25, Vesalius launched a full assault on Galen. Lecturing at Padua and then at Bologna, he rigged up skeletons of humans and of Barbary macaques, and showed the assembled students how wrong Galen had been. Vesalius then set out to put together a new anatomy book that included his discoveries. Over the next four years Vesalius worked with the finest block cutters of Venice and draftsmen from Titian’s workshop. He named his book De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, or “The Seven Books on the Structure of the Human Body”—commonly known as the Fabrica. In this 1543 masterwork, men and women now stood stripped of skin (right). Skeletons (left) leaned lazily against columns in the rolling Italian countryside. Humans are not so unique Fabrica launched a new tradition in anatomy in Europe, in which anatomists trusted only their own observations and explored the body like a new continent. Vesalius’ discovery of the important differences between species also helped usher in the science of comparative anatomy, in which researchers studied animals to find their similarities and differences. In the process, they gradually began to recognize humans as being one species among many, with a few unique traits but many others shared in common with other animals. Some 300 years after Vesalius first Images from the Fabrica (click to see shook off the blind obedience to Galen, Darwin used that vast stock of anatomical knowledge to build his theory of larger versions) evolution. View this article online at: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/history_02 Vesalius and dissection images courtesy of Historical Collections and Services, The Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia; Fabrica images property of the Regents of the University of Michigan Understanding Evolution © 2009 by The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California 2 di 2 22/10/2009 10.38 evolution.berkeley.edu http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/print/printable_template.php?article_id=history_03&context=... Observation and Natural Theology: William Harvey & William Paley In the 1600s the study of life changed forever. After relying on the authority of ancient writers like Aristotle and Galen for centuries, European naturalists began to look at life for themselves. Anatomists discovered new organs in the human body, and also discovered that familiar organs didn’t work the way Aristotle and Galen said they did. The English physician William Harvey (above left), for example, discovered in the early 1600s that blood was pumped from the heart through the body in a closed loop. Meanwhile, Harvey and others were examining animals and plants and making equally astonishing discoveries. The English inventor, Robert Hooke, for example, looked through a microscope at a previously unimaginable complexity hidden in tiny animals as humble as a flea. Envisioning organisms as machines This new generation of naturalists envisioned life as machines. Like human-made machines, an animal had many Harvey showed how blood, pumped by the heart, circulated through vessels in different parts—muscles, eyes, bones, organs, and so on—that all played vital functions to help keep the animal the arm. alive. Naturalists found that they could apply the same scientific methods in physics that they used to invent machines, to life itself. Natural theology and God’s design Some clergymen worried that this mechanistic approach of life smacked of atheism. But many of the naturalists themselves believed that they actually were on a religious mission. In fact, a number of them were both naturalists and theologians. They believed that God had created the entire world in such a way that his plan could be understood in part by rational creatures. By studying the intricate structures of a hand or a feather, a naturalist could appreciate God’s benevolent design. Natural theology, as it became known, dominated English thinking for nearly two centuries. In the early 1800s, it was best known to Englishmen through the writings of Reverend William Paley (left). Natural theology was important scientifically because it guided researchers to the fundamental question of how life works. Even today, when scientists discover a new kind of organ or protein, they try to figure out its function. But it would be Charles Darwin, who actually occupied Paley’s rooms at Cambridge University and was an admirer of Paley’s work, who would take science beyond natural theology and move those questions from the religious sphere to the scientific. View this article online at: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/history_03 Harvey and blood circulation images courtesy of the National Library of Medicine; Paley image courtesy of The Book Page 1 di 2 22/10/2009 10.40 evolution.berkeley.edu http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/print/printable_template.php?article_id=history_04&context=... Fossils and the Birth of Paleontology: Nicholas Steno If one day in history had to be picked as the birth of paleontology, it might be the day in 1666 when two fishermen caught a giant shark off the coast of Livorno in Italy. The local duke ordered that this curiosity be sent to Niels Stensen (better known as Steno), a Danish anatomist working at the time in Florence. As Steno dissected the shark, he was struck by how much the shark teeth resembled “tongue stones,” triangular pieces of rock that had been known since ancient times. Today, most people would instantly wonder whether the tongue stones were giant petrified shark teeth, but in 1666 such a presumption was a tremendous leap. Few could imagine how living matter could be turned to stone, and beyond that, encased in solid rock—especially if the rock were well above sea level and contained remnants of a marine organism. Fossils were instead thought to have fallen from the sky, or to be “sports of nature”—peculiar geometrical shapes impressed on the rocks themselves. From living tissue to stone Steno made the leap and declared that the tongue stones indeed came from the mouths of once-living sharks. He showed how precisely similar the stones and the teeth were. But he still had to account for how they could have turned to stone and become lodged in rock. Naturalists of Steno’s day were becoming convinced that matter was composed of different combinations of tiny “corpuscles”—what today we would call molecules. Steno argued that the corpuscles in the teeth were replaced bit by bit, by corpuscles of minerals. In this gradual process, the teeth didn’t lose their overall shape as they turned from tissue to stone.
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