Galileo and the Health Sciences
Anatomy
Galileo’s intellectual circle included artists, engineers and physicians. Leonardo da Vinci was not the only artist who engaged in dissections and constructed machines. Renaissance artists studied anatomy with medical students, engineers studied drawing with artists, and physicians applied mechanical concepts to open up new ways of understanding the human body. The common conversation among artists, engineers and physicians is manifest in the artistic and mechanical aspects of these anatomical works.
Browse Items on Display
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Anatomy, 1507 Luzzi, Mondino dei (1507) Medieval human dissection manual: Written in 1316 by a professor of medicine at the University of Padua, the Anatomy of Mondino was the most widely-used manual for human dissection in the middle ages. |
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Anatomy, 1541 Luzzi, Mondino dei (1541) Art and anatomy converging in an illustrated manual: These human figures are more than utilitarian: walking against a real background, posed as if revealing to our eyes the unseen beauty and wonder of human anatomy; they also reflect an increasingly artistic approach to the human body. |
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On the Dissection of the Parts of the Human Body Estienne, Charles (1545) Clip art with woodblocks: Estienne obtained a number of woodblocks from an obscure artist. To show anatomical detail, he cut little rectangles out of the art woodblocks and substituted his own diagrammatic drawings. |
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On the Fabric of the Human Body, 1543 Vesalius, Andreas (1543) Best known work of early modern anatomy: Vesalius was fortunate to team up with Jan Stephan van Calcar, a world class artist. Even the human skeletons reveal an aesthetic appreciation of the human body. |
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Correspondence Vesalius, Andreas (1546) ABC’s of the life of medical students: The decorative initials used in this edition of Vesalius’ correspondence are identical to 22 different initials originally printed in De fabrica (1543). Such “historiated initials” tell stories. |
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On Anatomy Colombo, Matteo Realdo (1559) Between Vesalius and Harvey at Padua: Colombo, a student of Vesalius at Padua, elucidated the pulmonary circulation and described the mitral valve of the heart. William Harvey frequently cited Colombo in his De motu cordis, (On the Circulation of the Blood, 1628). |
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Anatomical Illustrations Eustachi, Bartolomeo (1716) Lost plates for treatises on teeth, hearing and the kidneys, rediscovered: In the 1560’s, Eustachi, a professor of medicine in the Collegia della Sapienza in Rome, wrote several treatises devoted to particular organs of the body, including a pioneering work on the teeth. |
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Commentary on the Canon of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) Santorio, Santorio (1646) Galileo’s physics, applied to medicine: Santorio Santorio (also known as Sanctorio or Sanctorius) practiced medicine in Padua, in the Venetian Republic. |
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Galileo Thermoscope replica, Bird Health Sciences Library Galileo’s thermoscope, developed in the context of pneumatic engineering, was an ancestor to the thermometer. Galileo pioneered scientific investigations with the thermoscope along with his two Paduan friends, Giovanni Sagredo and Santorio Santorio. |
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On the Motion of Animals, 1680 - 81 Borelli, Giovanni (1680-81) The physics of bones and muscles: Borelli, a practicing mathematician and engineer as well as a physician, analyzed the musculoskeletal system in terms of the mechanics of the lever and other simple machines. Borelli studied under Galileo’s student Castelli, along with Torricelli. |
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Anatomical Observations Steno, Nicolaus (1662) Stensen’s duct, by a founder of geology: Steno, a physician who worked for Ferdinand II de Medici in Florence, is known to generations of geologists as the founder of stratigraphy and an early advocate of the organic origin of fossils. |
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The Anatomical Exercises of Dr. William Harvey Harvey, William (1653) Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, first time in English: Concluding a series of brilliant teachers and students at the medical school of Padua that included Vesalius, Colombo, and Acquapendente (a friend of Galileo’s), Harvey marshaled a combination of quantitative,... |
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On the Body, 1662 Descartes, René (1662) The body in mechanical philosophy: Descartes applied the mechanical philosophy to every field of natural knowledge, including cosmology, meteorology, the Earth, astronomy and, in this book, the human body. |
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On the Body, 1677 Descartes, René (1677) The illustration of the heart in this French edition shows a different artistic style than the Latin edition. |
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Living Anatomy von Hellwig, Christoph (1720) Four leaves of colored, interactive anatomical flaps appear throughout this popular anatomical textbook, which recapitulates the combination of art, engineering and anatomy in Galileo’s world. |
