Rethinking Vesalius
Rethinking Vesalius
Some New Answers to Old Questions
Vivian Nutton
30 January 2025 – 5 PM (CET)
The last 15 years have seen many new discoveries about Andreas Vesalius, the great renaissance anatomist, and his De humani corporis fabrica. They have included the discoveries of two sets of annotations that he made to his writings on anatomy as well as many details of his family and his early life.
In this talk I shall be exploring some of the consequences of these discoveries for our understanding of Vesalius and his Fabrica from his time in Paris in the in the 1530s right through until the last years of his career as royal physician.
Not only do they show his passion for getting everything right and correcting his books from the moment that they appeared in print, but they also remind us that he was first and foremost a physician who treated many of the most important figures in Europe.
A key document in this is his almost entirely neglected Paraphrase of Rhazes Book 9, which in turn leads to a new consideration of the place and role of Basle and its printers in the Vesalius’ career from 1537 until the second edition of the Fabrica in 1555 and possibly even later.
About the Speaker ...
Vivian Nutton is the current president of the CSMBR Pisa and Emeritus Professor of History of Medicine at UCL London.
He received is BA in Classics at Cambridge in 1965 and subsequently taught there as a Fellow of Selwyn College (1967–77). He received his PhD in 1970. Since 1977 he has worked at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine as a Lecturer, and since 1993 as Professor. He is a member of several international learned societies and a Fellow of the British Academy. Since 2015 he has worked at I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University (1st MSMU). Prof. Nutton’s main field of research is the Greek physician Galen. Beyond that, his work comprises the whole of the ancient history of medicine and its reception history, in particular during the Renaissance and in the Muslim world.
