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The works of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) have long been regarded among the great treasures of the Renaissance. Published as medical books while he was teaching anatomy and dissection at the University of Padua, they include the Tabulae Sex (1538), intended as an aid to students; the magnificently illustrated De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), and the companion volume, the Epitome (1543). Individually, these books are milestones in the history of medicine. They also offer one of the most magnificent collections of anatomical drawings ever published. The plates were executed with such vitality and originality that they have been attributed to the most talented illustrators of the sixteenth century, not to mention Vesalius himself. Many of the drawings, in fact, were products of Titian's famous atelier.
For this edition of the Vesalius illustrations, Dover has combined the best existing plates and text. The illustrations have been reproduced from the sumptuous (1934) Munich edition of Vesalius titled Icones Anatomicae . The Munich plates were struck for the most part from the original wood blocks then in the collection of the Library of the University of Munich. These priceless art objects were destroyed in the bombing of Munich during World War II. Aside from the original copies of the woodcuts (of which only a few complete sets are known), the Munich restrikes are the best representations of the Vesalian anatomical drawings, for they preserve much of the freshness and richness of the 1543 edition.
The text of this Dover edition has been faithfully reproduced from an edition of Vesalius published by World Publishing Company in 1950. The editors, distinguished authorities on sixteenth-century medicine, have provided a very comprehensive history of Vesalius, his career, and excellent explanations of the legends surrounding the illustrators, artists, and publishers involved with the production of his books. No other source will provide the general reader, bibliophile, art historian, artist, or historian of science and medicine with such complete data on Vesalius and his fabulous anatomical illustrations.

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Born in Brussels, Belgium, Andreas Vesalius was a Flemish anatomist whose sixteenth-century work, De humani corporis fabrica, is widely considered one of the most influential medical books. Educated at the University of Louvain, Vesalius chose the University of Paris for his medical training, where he became interested in anatomy and acquired his skills at dissection, both in the tradition of Galen. He left Paris and completed his education in 1537 at the University of Padua, then the most famous college in Europe. In Padua, Vesalius published a dissection manual for his students and continued to refine his dissection techniques and to expand his knowledge of human anatomy, mainly by dissecting cadavers. He also began to note discrepancies between his observations and what was then published about human anatomy, based on Galen's work in the second century. In 1540 Vesalius began developing the Fabrica, as it is called, which took nearly three years. He supervised all aspects of the making of the book and its publication in 1543, giving the world the finest elucidation of anatomy to that date. It proved that much of Galenic anatomy was based on inaccurate assumptions, thus altering the study of medicine profoundly. The exquisite illustrations, drawn by artists in Titian's Venetian studio, are so outstanding that they are important as art and as science. Several supplements to the original and a second edition of this great anatomical treatise were published in Vesalius's lifetime. Surprisingly, he gave up his anatomical studies and became a court physician to Emperor Charles V and later to Philip II of Spain, at whose court he remained until his death. (Bowker Author Biography)