When the Renaissance physician Andreas Vesalius wrote his magnum opus on human anatomy in 1543, he changed the study of medicine and revolutionized the way scientists investigated the world.
An “amazing” edition of his De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, estimated to be worth up to £1m, is to be sold at auction for the first time since scholars discovered it was annotated by Vesalius himself.
The fragile 800-page book was last sold in 2007 for around £8,500 to Dr Gerard Vogrincic, a retired Canadian pathologist and medical history buff who collects old annotated medical books.
He noted that the entire text, which earned Vesalius a reputation as the “father of modern human anatomy”, was heavily annotated from start to finish in Latin, with unusual crossings of paragraphs, minor edits to drawings and corrections of punctuation and spelling mistakes. “It was quite remarkable,” he said.
“There were many pages filled with notes and often what was written in the margin was crossed out and written over again. This was not what an annotator would typically do, underlining and making marginal notes to highlight important information. What this person did was rewrite the book.”
Unable to read Latin, Vogrincic decided to compare the handwriting of the annotator with other known examples of Vesalius’ handwriting. When more than 100 words looked like an identical match, he contacted renowned Vesalius expert Prof Vivian Nutton, at the UCL Center for the History of Medicine, who read and studied the notes – and confirmed that they were indeed was made by Vesalius.
“Once you see the sheer number of all those corrections, it’s staggering,” Nutton said, adding that some of the notes are instructions to the printer, while others are notes and indications “that only the author could have made”.
“There is absolutely no doubt.”
He said that reading the notes offers a unique opportunity to “remember Vesalius. You can see how he thinks, what is interesting to him, why he tries to do something.”
Vogrincic had no idea when he bought the book that Vesalius had ever touched it, let alone annotated it, but he wanted it for his collection regardless. He said: “This book changed the way medicine was thought about. Before Vesalius wrote this, people just assumed that the ancient Greek doctors, Hippocrates and Galen, were the authorities – and not to be questioned.”
Galen, who was born in AD 129, dominated the study of anatomy for more than a millennium – even though he based his anatomical accounts mainly on the dissection of animals such as Barbary apes.
His inaccuracies persisted because most anatomy professors who read and taught Galen to college students did not perform dissections themselves. It was seen as manual labor, and so left to surgeons.
Vesalius, whose medical genius earned him a professorship at 23, “had a completely different mindset,” Vogrincic said. “He had to see for himself. And the more he looked and did his own dissections, he saw that Galen was wrong. And that’s when he started questioning all the authority that had come down through the ages and said: we have to find out for ourselves what the truth is.”
When Vesalius published his highly controversial discoveries in the Fabrica at the age of 28, he interspersed his text with detailed illustrations of human anatomy, which were “unsurpassed at the time in beauty and accuracy and quality,” Vogrincic said.
Doctors continued to rely on his anatomy illustrations for more than 200 years. “It’s a remarkable piece of work, far in advance of anything else available at the time,” Nutton said. “He quickly created a system of anatomy and presented it in a totally different and unique way.”
Vesalius published a second edition of the Fabrica in 1555, and scholars have concluded that the copy up for auction Wednesday at Christie’s in New York was annotated by the author in preparation for a third edition.
“These are partly notes he made for the printer – but entirely for himself,” says Nutton, who spent two years studying the notes, before other scholars were given access to the book via the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, where it was housed for more than a decade.
This allowed Vogrincic to share his discovery with the world while ensuring he could still afford to own it. “Book collectors dream about a find like this and it was certainly exciting. But to secure a book so valuable in the house – the cost is outrageous,” he said.
A third edition of the Fabrica was never published due to Vesalius’ untimely death, at the age of 50, in a shipwreck. Scholars now consider this unique annotated copy to be Vesalius’ final revision of his famous text. “I would be afraid to have it in my house now, afraid to look at it and afraid there is a fire in the house. It is too important, and too expensive,” said Vogrincic.
“It’s like owning the crown jewels.”
