Chrestien Wechel and Vesalius : twelve unique medical broadsides from the sixteenth century / by Sten G. Lindberg.

  • Sten G. Lindberg
Date:
1954
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Chrestien Wechel and Vesalius : twelve unique medical broadsides from the sixteenth century / by Sten G. Lindberg. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    that the authority of Avicenna and the Arabs was discarded for that of Galen, Hippocrates and Celsus.5 It is the doctrines of these latter that Vesalius illus¬ trates in his Tabulae and which are the basis of the “pre-Vesalian” anatomy of the Adam and Eve plates. These broadsides have always puzzled the medical historians who have studied them, including such authorities as Ludwig Choulant (Dresden, 1852)6, Fritz Weindler (Dresden, 1908)7, J. G. De Lint (Gorinchem, Holland (1922), 1923)8, and LeRoy Crummer (Omaha, Neb. 1923 and 1925)9. Crummer grouped the whole of the then known material into three main categories. The first group, which shows the skeleton, is subdivided into seven different types with fourteen variants; the second group, Vesalius’s Tabulae and plagiarised versions of them, comprises eight types with thirteen variants; and the third main group, Adam and Eve, twelve types with twenty-seven variants. Practically all of these twenty-seven types with their fifty-four variants are either unique or extant in very few copies, published between 1493 and 1683, most of them in the middle or latter half of the sixteenth century. The twelve broadsides in the Royal Library are not identical with any of these variants. In the order in which I intend to treat them, three belong to the group of plagiarised Vesalius plates, five to the skeleton group, and two pairs to the Adam and Eve group. A list of them with a detailed bibliographical description will be given in the conclusion. II Our knowledge of the pirated versions of Vesalius’s Tabulae is largely derived from Vesalius himself. In a letter which he wrote on the 24th August (1542, according to the unanimous opinion of scholars) to his publisher in Basle, 5 See S. Lindroth, “Medicin och humanism under renassansen” (Lychnos 1950—51, 163 —181). 6 L. Choulant, Geschichte und Bibliographic der anatomischen Abbildung, Leipzig 1852, particularly pp. 39—42. Several additions were made in the English translation by Mortimer Frank, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration, Chicago 1920, 156—167. 7 F. Weindler, Geschichte der gynakologisch-anatomischen Abbildung, Dresden 1908, particularly pp. 104—112, where there are important illustrations. 8 J. G. De Lint, “Fugitive Anatomical Sheets” (Janus 28 (1924), 78—91, including 7 plates). 9 L. Crummer, “Early Anatomical Fugitive Sheets” (Annals of Medical History 5 (1923), 189—209, with 10 figures). And “Further Information on Early Anatomical Fugitive Sheets” (Ibidem 7 (1925), 1—5 with 2 figures). His collections are now in the Michigan University Library, Ann Arbor.
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