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In addition to explaining human anatomy and castigating the errors of
Galen and other authorities, Vesalius used the words of the Fabrica to
reward friends with high praises and punish enemies by advertising their
offenses. This was a common practice in Renaissance writing. The skilful
deployment of praise and blame was a lasting display of power as well
as a way of paying off old and new scores.
Par excellence, the first of friends was the Holy Roman Emperor Charles
V, Vesalius' patron and the employer of his father, who served as court
pharmacist. The praises laid on in the Preface to the Fabrica lead up
to this peroration:
| I am rightly mindful of Alexander the Great, who
did not wish to be painted except by Apelles, cast in bronze except
by Lysippus, or sculpted except by Pyrgoteles, and I have thought
it still less proper for me to enumerate any of your praises here,
lest I pour darkness instead of light on them by my meager and unpracticed
style—especially since the hackneyed ritual of prefaces is altogether
to be condemned in which indiscriminately and with little regard to
merit, as if in accordance with some standard formula and for the
sake of some cheap gratuity, everyone is routinely credited with admirable
learning, singular prudence, remarkable clemency, keen judgement,
untiring generosity, remarkable love for men of letters and scholarship,
supreme dispatch in the conduct of business, and the entire chorus
of virtues, in which everybody knows perfectly well (though the words
are not mine) your majesty exceeds all mortals no less than in dignity,
success, and triumphant achievements. For this you will be venerated
in your own lifetime as if you were the greatest divinity, whom I
pray the gods may not begrudge to science and all the world, but most
abundantly preserve and protect for mortals unharmed and forever successful. |
More often selected for special praise were personal friends. One such
person had known Vesalius during his student years in Louvain, 1536—37,
and later participated in the defense of Louvain against the invading
French in July 1542. The tribute to Pfluegel was also an oblique complement
to Charles V, adversary of the French in this war. The last words of Book
I chapter 5 in the 1543 Fabrica pay this tribute to
a most zealous student of the works of nature
and a most high-minded young man, Christopher Pfluegel of Salzburg,
who is learned in many languages, skilled in other arts, and particularly
distinguished for his knowledge of civil law; he recently gave an
outstanding example of his utterly superb courage when as commander
of the students of the University of Louvain he so swiftly and rapidly
freed Louvain from its second great seige. |
For reasons unknown (possibly Pfluegel's death) the passage was dropped
from the 1555 Fabrica. Some of those mentioned in the fulsome manner reserved
for such tributes had encouraged Vesalius to undertake the Fabrica and
may have provided material support:
| Marcus Antonius Genua is accustomed to contemplate
the harmony of the organ of hearing with the greatest pleasure. Not
only is this man the most consummate of musicians but also the special
glory of the philosophers of our time, an eminent person and a professor
of philosophy, the most learned among the Paduans in a variety of
disciplines, to whom students of science will owe as much as they
will gain from this effort of mine, since he first inspired me to
begin this work, and has been no less my eager counsellor than the
rare model of virtue Wolfgang Herwort, a patrician of Augsburg, because
of his incredible goodwill toward letters and scholars; most worthy
of immortality, and special object of my devotion while I live because
he has left nothing undone within his powers for the completion of
this work. |
  Some
of these personages may also be represented in the title page of the Fabrica.
O'Malley speculates that the former of the two mentioned above, Marcantonio
Passeri of Genoa (1491 1563), professor of philosophy at Padua, is the
figure standing to the right of the dissecting table in the title page
of the Fabrica (shown right), admonishing the barking dog (who appears
also to be stepping on his toe) to be silent—or, more plausibly,
fending off a pickpocket who is about to be collared by another spectator
standing behind him. Wolfgang Peter Herwart (1514-1585), a native of Augsburg,
probably became Vesalius' friend while they were students at Padua. O'Malley
speculates that he is the large man standing to the left of the dissecting
table, his right hand on his hip, on the title page of the Fabrica (shown
left).
At least one of the friends mentioned cordially in the 1543 Fabrica later
became a critic and rival. The anatomist Renaldo Colombo is mentioned
in Bk. I chapter 13 as "my good friend Renaldo Colombo, now a professor
of sophistic at Padua, a most diligent student of anatomy." But the
two later fell out when, after Vesalius had taken imperial service, Colombo
gave anatomy lectures at Padua and began belittling his former professor's
reputation. One of Colombo's dubious claims to distinction was that he
had discovered the clitoris (De re anatomica, 1559, p. 243), which he
named amor Veneris, vel dulcedo.
Among the enemies attacked in the Fabrica are plagiarists whom Vesalius
does not mention by name, their identity known only from later statements
by Vesalius and detective work by 20th century scholars. Jobst de Necker,
for example, is mentioned in the Preface only as "the Augsberg engraver,"
who in June 1539 issued an unauthorized edition of the Tabulae sex . "The
Strasburger" identified as Walther Ryff, a notorious plagiarist who
pirated a large number of books between 1541 and 1545, is castigated in
the same Preface as having "done the worst disservice to medical
study because he has so disgracefully reduced illustrations which could
never be made large enough for students, colored them execrably, arbitrarily
surrounded them with the Augsburger's version of the text, and published
them as his own work." Ryff receives additional criticism in Book
III of the Fabrica for faults in his plagiarized illustrations: "Though
that traced copy is inferior for many reasons, it must also be rejected
because all the veins represented there appear to be distributed on only
one surface of the body, and seem to belong only to the anterior part."
(It was Vesalius' practice to create a three dimensional impression by
shading blood vessels that are farther away from the viewer.) Another
plagiarist, Johannes Dryander, draws fire in Vesalius' Preface as one
"who is still indiscriminately compiling pictures from other people's
books everywhere and publishing books of that kind at Marburg and Frankfurt."
He is alluded to in Bk. 2 ch. 7 as a "certain mathematician"
who misrepresented the saw best suited for cutting the bone of the skull,
and again, more courteously, this time by name in Bk. 5 ch. 4. Appointed
professor of mathematics and medicine at Marburg in 1535, his Anatomia
capitis humani (Marburg,1536, 1537) was one of the first illustrated anatomy
books. In 1541 he had plagiarized the illustrations in Vesalius' Tabulae
sex (1538), a popular and potentially profitable set of anatomical posters
with marginal comments. Part of Vesalius' immediate success grew from
his realization that good illustrations were essential to the study of
anatomy and his ability to obtain the services of skilled artists and
wood engravers. Publishers, professors, and booksellers were all too quick
to cash in illegally on his success.
Though books had been mass produced with movable type for nearly a century
by the time Oporinus published the Fabrica in Basel, they could still
be hard to get, and hard feelings could result when access was denied.
Vesalius made no secret of his annoyance that he was not allowed to see
a Greek copy of Galen's introductory treatise On the Bones,
| when certain persons indifferent or even hostile
to the common good so suppress the Greek copy that I was unable for
any reason to obtain permission from them to use it for a time. Except
for Balamius and Cardinal Rodolphus, they even admitted that they
had it, but only on condition that it not be shared with me. |
Here the targets of Vesalius' anger are named: Ferdinandus
Balamio (fl. ca.1515), physician to Pope Leo X, translated Galen's De
ossibus into Latin; Rodolpho Pio of Carpi was made cardinal in 1536. Vesalius'
irate reference to Cardinal Pio, who lived until 1564, was prudently deleted
from the 1555 edition of the Fabrica. The same note of exasperation returns
in Book II chapter 19 when Vesalius complains of the loss of the later
books of Galen's manual On Anatomical Procedures:
| The part of his book De anatomicis administrationibus in which he
surely explained the muscles of the tongue is lost to us together
with his work On Dissection, or rather is being suppressed in the
hands of persons who begrudge the common good, and it cannot be used
(when it should be teaching dissection) as it lies in obscurity to
be gnawed and cut apart by maggots and bookworms. |
The outlines of a passionate nature appear often enough
to remind us that the author of the Fabrica was not only one who remembered
his friends but also a young man of impatient temper, with little inclination
to turn the other cheek when offended.
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