On the Fabric of the Human Body. Book 2, The Ligaments and Muscles (review)

Andreas Vesalius. On the Fabric of the Human Body. Book 2, The Ligaments and Muscles. Translated by William Frank Richardson, in collaboration with John Burd Carman. Norman Anatomy Series, no. 2; Norman Landmarks Series, no. 2. San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1999. xxix + 490 pp. Ill. $225.00 (0-930405-75-7).

A little over a year ago, some young Latinists as well as two medical students and I met to discuss the first volume of what promised to be an interesting new series of translations. In 1998 Professor Frank Richardson, a classicist at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in collaboration with Professor John Burd Carman, his colleague from the Department of Anatomy, had translated and annotated Book 1 of Andreas Vesalius's masterpiece, De humani corporis fabrica. Though a huge treatise on osteology written in humanistic sixteenth-century Latin hardly seemed attractive to many modern students, Richardson's vivid version excited us all. He had succeeded in accurately rendering the text of the first book in Vesalius's landmark compendium into readable modern English. We all wondered if anyone could maintain the pace and excellence of this daunting project.

The present volume provides ample evidence that Richardson and Carman can. Yet, the second book of the Fabrica is vastly different from the first. Book 1 opens with a description of the bones, for Vesalius argued that the bones are the foundation of the body, the structure to which everything else is related. His underlying motive in composing and publishing the Fabrica was both to persuade the medical world to appreciate anatomy as fundamental to other aspects of medicine and to demonstrate the fallaciousness of texts based on Galenic dogmatic principles. In Book 1 we find some of Vesalius's strongest attacks on Galen's authoritative statements, such as, for example, his indictment of the Greek physician's assertion that the human mandible was composed of two bones.

In Book 2, Vesalius introduced an important new technique to his orchestrated assault on Galenic dicta. Using the printed image to its greatest advantage, he supervised the publication of illustrations with full explanatory legends related by letters and numbers. The anatomical detail and the marginal references, which in some instances relate a textual description to several illustrations located in different parts of the work, demonstrate both Vesalius's recognition of the real purpose of illustrations and his determination to achieve it. This accomplishment comes to light at the beginning of Book 2, where he explains the purpose and positioning of the famous and often reproduced "muscle-men":

I shall place at the beginning of this book a series of sixteen tables, which will apply to nearly all the chapters of Book II: they could just as well have been placed at the end as at the beginning of the book. The first fourteen show whole figures. Table I shows a frontal view of the male body, Table II a lateral view; Tables III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII also show a frontal view, and slightly to one side or the other depending upon the nature and location of the muscles portrayed. The six that follow Table VIII show the body from the back, and are drawn in such a way that the features depicted in any one illustration can be seen in the next one cut away and hanging from their insertion. (p. 1)

Further on, Vesalius cautions his readers:

Do not be satisfied with studying a particular muscle in only one figure, even if I have marked it with a symbol; in order that you may see where each one is prominent or lies under another you should look for it in all the plates, and examine it especially in those where the whole of it is exposed to view--this is usually where several symbols appear on the one muscle...