Tag Archives: Andreas Vesalius

Erik Waller the book collector

October 18, 2022

Anna Lantz Stockholm, Sweden   Figure 1. Erik Waller in his home. No date, unknown photographer. Uppsala University Library, Waller MS Waller 0004. Erik Waller (1875–1955) was a Swedish surgeon and book collector who spent most of his professional life in Lidköping, a small town in the southwest of Sweden. He received his medical education […]

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543)

January 26, 2022

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Fig 1. Statue of Copernicus, Warsaw, Poland. Photo by Arpan K. Banerjee. Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 Feb 1473 in the Prussian town of Torun, now part of Poland. He studied at the Jagiellonian University of Cracow, and although his main subjects were mathematics and astronomy, he […]

Handmaidens of anatomy

October 21, 2021

Elisabeth Brander St. Louis, Missouri, United States   Fig. 1 Frontispiece of De humani corporis fabrica. Andreas Vesalius. De humani corporis fabrica. Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1543. Image Credit: Bernard Becker Medical Library. Some of the most well-known images in the history of anatomy are the woodcut écorché figures that appear in Andreas Vesalius’s De humani […]

Between Vesalius and the CAT scan

October 7, 2021

Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   Museo di Storia Naturale di Firenze, Zoologia “La Specola”, Florence, Italy. Wax anatomical models. September 2006. Photo by Daderot. Via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0. Scribe: noun. A person who copies documents, especially a person who made handwritten copies before the invention of printing. — dictionary.com   The first reliable anatomic drawings […]

A brief history of kidney transplantation

September 8, 2020

Laura Carreras-Planella Marcella Franquesa Ricardo Lauzurica Francesc E. Borràs Barcelona, Spain   We may think of renal transplantation as routine therapy today, but this procedure has taken centuries to develop and is marked by important events in the history of science. An ancient description of the kidneys is found in the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus, dated […]

A sporting end to Henry II, King of France

March 2, 2020

Julius P. Bonello Adam Awwad Peoria, Illinois, United States   Henry II. Source Since the first wheel rolled out of the mouth of a cave, sports have been a staple in our social fabric. From throwing balls to picking up sticks, from tug-of-war to wrestling, from chess to football, and from horse racing to car […]

Bartolomeo Eustachio of the Anatomical Trinity

July 1, 2019

The tube connecting the inner ear to the throat that may become painfully blocked during a plane landing was described in the sixteenth century by Bartolomeo Eustachi—more often known by his Latin name of Eustachio.1 He constituted, along with Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) and Gabriele Falloppio (1523–1562), the Anatomical Trinity from which the modern science of […]

Bibliotheca Sibbaldiana

May 15, 2019

Colin McDowall Edinburgh, Scotland   Figure 1: Sir Robert Sibbald by Willem Verelst or John Alexander. Photo credit: Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh On 5 February 1723 a crowd gathered at the house of the late Sir Robert Sibbald, noted Edinburgh physician, for the auction of his personal library. Sibbald was a considerable collector […]

Harvard medical school and the body snatchers

April 12, 2019

Kevin R. Loughlin Boston, Massachusetts, USA   Figure 1: Woodcut illustration from Fasciculus medicinae (1491) depicting a Lector, Ostensor, and Sector during a dissection Their silhouettes surely would have been seen against the backdrop of a moonlit night in 1796 as they entered the North Burying Ground in Boston. Their hearts were likely filled with […]

Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library

March 3, 2017

Anna Lantz Sweden   Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library September 28, 2011 Anders Johan Hagströmer (1753–1830) was one of Sweden’s leading anatomists and a student of Linnaeus. A cofounder of both the Swedish Society of Medicine and of the Karolinska Institute,1 he was also a collector of medical and scientific books, which he donated to the library […]