Renaissance Lives | Andreas Vesalius: Anatomy and the World of Books

Sachiko Kusukawa in conversation with Daniel Margocsy

A revisionist biography of Andreas Vesalius—the father of modern anatomy—as deeply shaped by Renaissance culture.

In 1543 the young and ambitious physician Andreas Vesalius published one of the most famous books in the history of medicine, On the Fabric of the Human Body. While we often think of dissection as destroying the body, Vesalius believed that it helped him understand how to construct the human body. In this book, Sachiko Kusukawa shows how Vesalius’s publication emerged from the interplay of Renaissance art, printing technology, and classical tradition. She challenges the conventional view of Vesalius as a proto-modern, anti-authoritarian father of anatomy through a more nuanced account of how Vesalius exploited cultural and technological developments to create a big and beautiful book that propelled him into imperial circles and secured his enduring fame.

This talk took palce on 20 March 2025

Renaissance Lives is a series of biographies published by Reaktion Books as well as a series of conversations discussing the ways in which individuals transmitted or changed the lives of traditions, ideas and images. https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/renaissance...