Self-portrait of Vesalius conducting his own dissecting. In the public dissections in the Padua university anatomical theater, he lectured from the side of the opened corpse, not from the traditional position of the lecturer’s chair.

From Vesalius’s Tabulae anatomicae sex (1538), a set of charts showing six functional systems of the body. This one illustrates the Galenic principle of the liver as the center of the blood vessels and the distribution of nutriment, through the blood, to all parts of the body.

The first plate of the muscles, De humani corporis fabrica. Vesalius has dissected away all the skin, fat, surface vessels, and sinews.

Like all the illustrations, it’s both “real” (what one could see in dissection) and “idealized” (focusing on a particular system that one would never seen in isolation in a patient).

The fifth plate of the muscles, De humani corporis fabrica, with many muscles dissected and lifted away. This illustration also shows what appears to be an error, but one that is made clear in Vesalius’s text.

The large abdominal muscle that appears to go up to the top of the ribs does not do so in humans, but does in dogs. Vesalius actually is making the point that this is how it would look if the dog’s structure were found in man, as Galen had inferred. Thus one must be careful even with Vesalius in using the plates as representations of reality.

The ninth plate of the muscles, De humani corporis fabrica, like the first, but with the ligaments of the right arm exposed as well. This begins a series of progressive dissection, as the muscles are removed  layer by layer, like a “flayed” body.

The first plate of the skeleton, De humani corporis fabrica. Getting to cleaned bones was one of Vesalius’s most difficult tasks. Cemetery bones would violate cultural and legal proscriptions against violation of the consecrated.  Boiling the tissue off his cadavers was perhaps limited by Pope Boniface VIII’s decree (1300) prohibiting boiling bones (used when transporting the remains of those who died abroad), which many took to limit anatomical investigation. He studied bones from cemeteries, but his most famous articulation was from the cadaver of a criminal who had been roasted, suspended from a stake outside the city walls, and picked clean by birds. Vesalius and a friend stole it from the gallows, and cleaned it further at home. The drawing is, of course, quite abstractly idealized — in this view there is none of the tissue that holds the skeleton together. The space under the arm has two interpretations — it is tied to an artistic motif of Death and the Dance of Death, and Vesalius also used such props to hold an articulated skeleton up for display.

One of the most famous images from De humani corporis fabrica, showing the moralistic and artistic conventions of illustrations. In some editions, the tomb is inscribed ‘Vivitur engenio, caetera mortis erunt’ [‘Genius lives on, all else is mortal’].

The female torso, De humani corporis fabrica. Note the realism of this as a view of a dissection, with the skin and muscles cut and folded back, and the careful placement and detail of the organs. Note, too, as in all these figures, the lack of text on the drawing itself. The small letters are indexed to Vesalius’s accompanying descriptive text.

Delineation of the nerves, De humani corporis fabrica. This is a very different kind of illustration, not showing a dissection in progress but rather a highly abstracted “system” in the body. Derived from dissection, the image nonetheless is not something one could see directly.