Events Calendar

Join us as we welcome, Daniel Garrison, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Classics at Northwestern University.

Vesalius Turns the Page on Ancient Medicine.
Thursday, November 20, 2014, 5:30-6:30
Hardin Library Room 401
Display of ancient Vesalius treatises to follow lecture.

This talk concentrates on the procedural contributions Vesalius made in his 1543 De humani corporis fabrica. Vesalius began his medical studies at the University of Paris, which was still a conservative institution that relied heavily on readings from Galen and later Medieval summaries and re-quired little or no hands-on dissection, even of an-imals. Vesalius introduced a new regimen at the University of Padua that called for hands-on dis-section by the students themselves and visual test-ing of anatomy rather than dependence upon books. He relied upon a tag from Horace, "Given to swear by the words of no man" which later be-came the motto of the Royal Society.

Co-sponsored by the University of Iowa History of Medicine Society, the UI Classics Department, and the UI Center for the Book.