PREFACE BY ANDREAS VESALIUS

...seen to have progressed, rather than in the dissection of bodies: to such an extent do the leaders of these men cling tooth and nail to some manner of speaking, and trusting the laziness of others in the task of cutting, they have shamefully reduced Galen into wasteful summaries. They never recede from him, while they follow his meanings, by even a hair’s breadth original: "ne latum quidem unguem" — literally "not even a broad fingernail," a common idiom for the smallest possible distance. Indeed, they add to the front of their books that their own writings are entirely stitched together from Galen’s decrees, and that all their work is his.

And thus everyone has given him such faith that no physician has been found who judged that even the slightest slip had ever been detected in Galen’s anatomical volumes, much less that one could be detected. This is despite the fact that, in the meantime (besides the fact that Galen frequently corrects himself, and in some books points out the negligence he committed in others once he became more experienced, and subsequently teaches the opposite), it is now clear to us, from the reborn art of dissection and diligent reading of Galen’s books—and in many places a not regrettable restoration of them—that he himself never dissected a recently dead human body.

Rather, having been deceived by his monkeys Galen primarily dissected Barbary macaques, assuming their internal structure was identical to humans (even if dried human corpses, prepared as if for the inspection of bones, occasionally came his way), he frequently and undeservedly argued against the ancient physicians who had exercised themselves in the preparation of humans. Furthermore, you may find very many things in his work which he even described incorrectly in monkeys. Not to mention that it is most wonderful how, in the manifold and infinite differences of the organs of the human body compared to the monkey, Galen noticed almost none, except in the fingers and the bend of the knee poplitis flexu: the back of the knee. He would undoubtedly have omitted these along with the rest, had they not been obvious to him without the dissection of a man.

But for the present, I have by no means resolved to criticize the false dogmas of Galen, easily the leader among the professors of dissection; still less would I wish to be held, right at the start, as impious toward the author of all good things, or as unobservant of his authority. For I am not ignorant of how physicians (very differently from the followers of Aristotle) are accustomed to be agitated when they observe, in the performance of a single Anatomy such as I now show in the schools, that Galen has declined from the true harmony, use, and function of the human parts more than two hundred times—all the while weighing the dissected particles grimly and with the greatest zeal for defending him.

Although even these men, led by the love of truth, gradually grow mild and place more trust in their own eyes and in effective reasoning than in the writings of Galen. These true paradoxes, not patched together from the attempts of others nor confirmed only by a heap of authorities, they have written so diligently here and there to friends, and have so happily and kindly encouraged them toward inspection and finally toward the knowledge of true Anatomy, that there is hope this study will shortly be so cultivated in all Universities as it was once accustomed to be practiced in Alexandria Alexandria in Egypt was the greatest center of anatomical study in antiquity, where human dissection was first permitted.

So that this may succeed under the happier auspices of the Muses, I have—to the best of my ability, beyond those things which I have published elsewhere on this subject, and which certain plagiarists, thinking me far absent from Germany, have published there as their own—now rearranged the history of the parts of the human body from scratch into seven books, in the same order in which I am accustomed to treat it in this city Vesalius refers to Padua, where he held the chair of surgery and anatomy, and in Bologna and Pisa, before that gathering of learned men.

For in this way, those who were present for the cutting will have commentaries on the things demonstrated, and will show Anatomy to others with less trouble. Moreover, these books will by no means be useless even to those for whom a personal inspection is denied, since they describe the number, position, shape, substance, connection to other parts, use, and function of every part of the human body, and many such things which we are accustomed to investigate while dissecting into the nature of the parts. They also include the technique of dissecting both the dead and the living, and they contain images of all the parts inserted into the context of the discourse, so that they place, as it were, a dissected body before the eyes of those who study the works of Nature.

of the first book

And indeed, in the first book I have described the nature of all the bones and cartilages, which, because the rest of the parts are supported by them...