Andreas Vesalius

Born in Brussels in 1514, Andries van Wezel took the Latinized name Andreas Vesalius and became a professor at the University of Padua in 1537. Between then and 1542, he dissected cadavers with his own hands — a practice most physicians considered beneath them — and documented what he actually saw. The result was De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, published in seven books, which dismantled Galen's long-dominant anatomical errors and redrew the map of the human body. The work made him founder of modern human anatomy and earned him a position as Imperial physician at the court of Emperor C…