Tag: Spring 2014
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Eliot’s triad: information, knowledge, and wisdom in medicine
Anthony Papagiannis Thessaloniki, Greece Where is the Wisdom we have lost in Knowledge? Where is the Knowledge we have lost in Information? Photography by Les Taylor I first saw these well-known lines by T. S. Eliot1 inscribed as a motto on the flyleaf of a Greek textbook on internal medicine. I was a student…
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Leonardo and the reinvention of anatomy
Salvatore Mangione Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA When Vesalius started his life journey five hundred years ago, Leonardo Da Vinci’s own journey into the human body was symbolically coming to an end. Denounced by a German collaborator for necromancy, he would eventually be barred by the Church from even entering the Ospedale di Santo Spirito under…
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In pursuit of a new anatomy
Roseanne F. ZhaoChicago, Illinois, United States The Brabantian physician and anatomist, Andreas Vesalius, is widely celebrated for breaking with Galenic tradition to revolutionize the study of anatomy, changing the practice of medicine, surgery, and education in the process. Born in 1514 in Brussels, Belgium (at that time, part of the Holy Roman Empire) to a…
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Vesalius: Spirit of excellence and inquiry
JMS Pearce United Kingdom This brief sketch is offered to commemorate the 500th birthday of Andreas Vesalius and the beginnings of post-Renaissance anatomy. Few men are more deserving of lasting fame than Vesalius. The prime importance of his anatomy is irrefutable. The current decline in anatomy teaching has provoked trenchant criticism.1 But Vesalius was not the…
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Bidloo and Ruysch: Anatomy and art in the 17th century Netherlands
Elisabeth BranderSt. Louis, Missouri, United States Of the many distinguished anatomists who worked in the Netherlands during the European Enlightenment, Frederick Ruysch and Govard Bidloo were the two most remarkable. They were contemporaries and aware of each other’s work,1 but at first glance their aesthetic approaches to anatomy seem wildly different. Bidloo (1638-1731) produced an…
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William Alcott and the cultural meaning of medical knowledge in the nineteenth century
Catherine MasChicago, Illinois, USA William Alcott (1798–1859) thought of himself as a medical missionary. He devoted most of his life’s work to spreading the nascent knowledge of anatomy and physiology infused with the message of Christian fulfillment. As a reformer and author of over 100 books, he wrote much on the subject of health, and…