Vesalius
What if the 1,300-year-old textbook is wrong?
That time, that place
He held the chair of anatomy at Padua. A dissection lecture then looked like this: the professor sat high above, reading Galen aloud; below, a barber-surgeon did the cutting while a demonstrator pointed out the part with a rod. The professor did not touch the body.
Why this question
Vesalius came down and took the knife himself.
And things kept turning up that the book did not describe. Naturally so — Galen had never opened a human body. What he had seen were apes and pigs.
What was found
He found over two hundred errors. The human lower jaw is one bone; Galen wrote two, because a dog's is two. The wall dividing the heart has no pores, though Galen said there were invisible ones.
But his larger achievement was the book itself. On the Fabric of the Human Body carried exacting anatomical plates drawn by artists from Titian's workshop — and thanks to printing, those plates were reproduced identically in hundreds of copies.
Now anyone could lay the book open beside a body they had opened themselves. Rather than refuting authority, he handed out the means of checking it.
The final authority on the human body was Galen's text
Bodies he dissected himself, and exacting plates drawn from them
The backlash was fierce. One critic argued that the human body had changed since Galen's day