Principles of Anatomy according to the Opinion of Galen by Johann Guinter and Andreas Vesalius

Vivian Nutton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351981156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Principles of Anatomy according to the Opinion of Galen is a translation of Johann Guinter's textbook as revised and annotated by Guinter's student, Andreas Vesalius, in 1538. Despite Vesalius' fame as an anatomist, his 1538 revision has attracted almost no attention. However, this new translation shows the significant rewrites and additional information added to the original based on his own dissections. 250 newly discovered annotations by Vesalius himself, published here in full for the first time, also show his working methods and ideas.

Together they offer remarkable insights into Vesalius' intellectual biography and the development of his most famous work: De humani corporis fabrica, 1543. An extensive introduction by Vivian Nutton also provides new information on Johann Guinter, and his substantial use of Vesalius' work for his own revised version of the text in 1539. Their joint production, a student textbook, is set against a background of the development of Renaissance anatomy, and of attitudes to their ancient Greek predecessor, Galen of Pergamum.

This text will be of great interest to historians of science and medicine, as well as to Renaissance scholars.

Part I
Introduction

Preface

Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (1514–1564) is the most famous of all anatomists, and his De humani corporis fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body), published at Basle in 1543 by Johannes Oporinus, a treasured possession of many libraries.¹ Man and book deserve their pre-eminence, as contemporaries recognised even before the actual publication of the Fab-rica.² Vesalius’ emphasis on the need for doctors to dissect and to understand the structures and workings of the body as the very foundation of medicine had earlier been a fundamental demand of the ancient Greek doctor, Galen of Pergamum, ca. 129–ca. 216, but Vesalius went far beyond his great predecessor in the accuracy and depth of his descriptions. His book is also one of the masterpieces of printing, a work of beauty as well as science that resolves for the first time most of the difficulties inherent in the task of depicting three-dimensional structures on a two-dimensional page. Throughout, Vesalius set new standards, creating a dialogue between the verbal content of his exposition and the visual depiction of the body in his plates. Although recent scholarship has shown how much he employed a variety of rhetorical devices to obscure his debts to his predecessors, and not least Galen himself, the Fabrica became within a few years the touch-stone of modern anatomy and the subject ever since of innumerable books, articles, and even novels.³

It is thus surprising to find that important discoveries can still be made about Vesalius and his work, let alone that large areas of his activity remain unexplored. In part, this is because Vesalius wrote in a Renaissance Latin that combines the technicalities of medicine with a high literary style, not easy even for a student of classical Latin to understand or to translate, and until recently most of his writings, including even the Fabrica itself, were unavailable in a modern Western language. His smaller treatises, if they were noticed or translated at all, were difficult of access and almost always viewed in the light of the Fabrica. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the lack of interest shown in the book that is here translated for the first time, the Institutiones anatomicae secundum Galeni sententiam, Principles of Anatomy according to the Opinion of Galen, published in Venice by Bernardinus in 1538, a revised and extended version of a book written by his teacher, Johann Guinter, and first published in Paris in 1536.⁴ No more than a handful of pages has ever been dedicated to this work in any biography of Vesalius, even in the standard accounts by Roth (1892: 93–94) and O’Malley (1964: 90–94), and only a single article (Drizenko, 2011) is cited in Maurits Biesbrouck’s (2016) substantial bibliography of Vesaliana. It is passed over in silence, even in articles on themes on which it bears directly.⁵ As a consequence, the significance of this book in the development of Vesalius’ thought has been underestimated, particularly because it provides new insights into his ideas in the crucial years from his period in Paris until the writing of the Fabrica. Not only does it put into words many of the new ideas visible in the much more familiar images of the Tabulae anatomicae sex, produced at the same time, 1538, for his Paduan students, but, of necessity, it goes much beyond them in providing new information about the processes and results of Vesalius’ investigations of the human body.⁶ Such neglect can no longer be justified, not least in the light of the many changes introduced by Vesalius into Guinter’s original.

The catalyst for this translation was the appearance in public of Vesalius’ own annotated copy of the 1538 Institutiones in the 2014 exhibition of Vesaliana at the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library of the University of Toronto. Its existence had been known for some time, but no scholar had been able to examine it until the owner, Dr Stuart Rose, allowed me to inspect it there, transcribe the notes, and later publish the preliminary results of my findings in 2015.⁷

It became clear during the course of my researches that these annotations represented the tip of a very large scholarly iceberg. Not only was my initial assumption wrong that in them Vesalius was always commenting on what Guinter had said in 1536, but the changes he had made in 1538 were far more extensive and significant than I had realised. Together, the notes and the 1538 edition contribute considerably to understanding how the Fabrica itself developed and throw light also on what the young Vesalius had done while in Paris, Louvain, and Padua. Together with the annotations by Vesalius to his copy of the second, 1555, edition of his great book, they allow us to follow Vesalius’ views on the anatomy of different parts of the body for some twenty years, from the mid-1530s to the end of the 1550s and, in the Examen of 1564, to within a few months of his death. One can track his changes of interest, or his opportunities to dissect, in a way that permits a much more nuanced view of his activities and development. Finally, a comparison between the 1538 edition and Guinter’s own revision of 1539 is an important indication of what Vesalius’ fellow Galenists were prepared to accept and of how they were beginning to draw the lines for the conflict that followed the publication of the Fabrica in 1543. In short, what began as a simple essay in editing some 250 annotations has broadened into a major study of much of Vesalius’ life and thought.

Andreas Vesalius, from Brussels to Padua

Few lives of Renaissance physicians are as well documented as that of Andreas Vesalius, from his birth on the last night of 1514 to his death on the Greek island of Zakynthos on his way back to Spain fifty years later. He came from a distinguished medical family in Flanders with court connections that went back to his great-great-grandfather. His great-grandfather, John, had taught medicine at the University of Louvain in the 1430s and ’40s, while his grandfather, Everard, had been personal physician to Archduke Maximilian and other members of the royal family. His father, who was an illegitimate son of Everard Vesalius, became an apothecary at the court of Margaret of Austria and then of the Emperor Charles V. Andreas, the second of his four children, was thus acquainted from childhood with members of the court in Brussels, which in the first decades of the sixteenth century was the home of Europe’s most powerful monarch, the Holy Roman Emperor.⁸

He enjoyed the education appropriate for his class of society. He would already have been taught Latin and Greek at school in Brussels before in 1530 he joined the Castle School, part of the Arts Faculty at Louvain, then enjoying a period of eminence as a centre of Northern Humanism.⁹ Here Vesalius studied more Latin and Greek, as well as the philosophical writings of Aristotle, but he was already interested in things medical. Louvain at this date had no great reputation for medicine, despite what he implies in his fulsome dedication of the 1538 Institutiones anatomicae, sgg. ii^r –iv^r, to Johannes Armenterianus, professor of medicine from 1525 to 1559. Its professors, according to Vesalius later, had little interest in anatomy, and in the controversies of the 1520s and ’30s over bloodletting and the interpretation of Galen, they stayed faithful to the medieval Arabist traditions in which they had been brought up. These had been under attack from the 1490s onwards from North Italian scholars such as Niccolò Leoniceno (1428–1524) and his successor at Ferrara, Giovanni Manardo (1461–1536), who showed convincingly that Galen’s meaning had become distorted by a complicated process of transmission during which his Greek had been translated into medieval Latin through a variety of intermediaries, including Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew. Translations direct from Greek were few and largely involved tracts of minor medical importance. The result was a confused and confusing terminology that could be corrected, they argued, only by a return to Galen’s original Greek.¹⁰

This took time, not least because, until the publication of the Aldine edition of Galen in 1525–1526, only a tiny proportion of Galen’s writings appeared in print in Greek, and those who wished, and were able, to consult the actual words of their great predecessor could do so only by reading Greek manuscripts. New Latin translations from the Greek were also almost entirely lacking. Northern doctors, less familiar on the whole with Greek than their Italian counterparts, remained faithful to the older, Arabised medicine, not least, because as one of them complained, without modern, accurate Latin translations, it was impossible for the Greekless to decide between competing claims for Galen.¹¹

This situation changed dramatically with the publication of the Aldine edition of the complete works of Galen in Greek in 1525–1526, and, still more, with the flood of new Latin translations that began to pour from the presses over the next decade. It was an exciting time to be studying medicine, as the newly available texts and translations revealed aspects of Galen and Galenic medicine that had become lost or overshadowed with the passage of the centuries, not least in anatomy. But although a Louvain graduate, Hubert Barland, might champion the new Galenism in 1532, the professors there remained resolutely conservative in their orientation down to 1542, when student protests brought about the dismissal of two senior figures, Arnold Noot and Leonard Willemaers.¹² It is hardly surprising that, when the time came, in 1533, Vesalius should have preferred to go elsewhere for his medical studies – to Paris, arguably the leading medical school North of the Alps.

There, from the 1520s onwards, a series of distinguished professors vigorously promoted the new Greek Galen within an environment that encouraged this return to the past as the basis for a new renaissance of all aspects of intellectual life and culture. The King of France, Francis I, was, like many other monarchs, keen to gain a reputation as a patron of learning, establishing the Collège de France as a centre of the new humanist studies and employing as his own personal physician, Guillaume Cop (1460–1532), one of the earliest translators of the Greek Galen. The growth in power of the French monarchy also benefitted Paris, as it grew in size and became the seat of the royal administration. The city became home to many printers, most notably Simon de Colines, and its burgeoning population also offered employment to graduates as teachers or as physicians. Relative peace in Northern Europe also meant that medical students like Vesalius and the Spaniard Miguel Servet (1509?–1553) could easily migrate to Paris for their studies.

The new humanist Galen had arrived there in the early 1520s. The Dean of the Faculty, Jean Vasses of Meaux (1486–1550), was among the earliest translators of Galen from the Greek, and other members of the Faculty were familiar with Greek even before it was decided in early 1526 to purchase a copy of the Aldine edition.¹³ The Paris printers also quickly brought out many editions of these translations, several of works not available before in Latin, and de Colines used the young Johann Guinter unsparingly as a source for new versions.¹⁴ This new material was transmitted enthusiastically to the students. Vesalius retained fond memories of Guinter as a teacher and expressed his thanks also to Vasses, an almost unknown Oliverius, and Jean Fernel (1506–1558), who was on his way to producing one of the first large syntheses of Galenic medicine and who was teaching medicine outside the Faculty at the Collège de Cornouaille.¹⁵ He attended the lectures of the newly appointed Professor Guinter, who was so impressed with his enthusiasm for dissection and by his prowess with a knife that he invited him to carry out dissections on his behalf both in public and in private.¹⁶ The 1536 Institutiones are thus based on lectures that Vesalius had heard and for which he acted as the dissector.

Anatomy was all the rage. The eager Vesalius took the opportunity to widen his knowledge of bones by visiting Parisian cemeteries and by playing a blindfold game with a fellow student to see who could identify a bone simply by touch.¹⁷ One should view with a certain scepticism his uncomplimentary view in the Fabrica of the official anatomy teaching as “a few casual and superficial demonstrations of a few organs by unskilled barbers”.¹⁸ He was no less scathing in 1546 about what he had learned from Jacobus Sylvius, whose lectures on Galen he found patronising and incomplete, illustrated only with bits of dogs.¹⁹ But his published reactions before 1543 were more enthusiastic, and others took a much more favourable view of these lectures.²⁰ Guinter in the Institutiones showed himself an effective teacher, and his decision to employ Vesaliu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Translation: The principles of anatomy according to the opinion of Galen
• Appendix: Vesalius’ annotations transcribed
• Bibliography
• Index to the 1538 edition
• Index to the introduction and notes