Medicine Transformed

Classical Texts and Modern Anatomists

The Renaissance saw new forms of medical study flourish at Rome. Scholars like Raphael's friend Marco Fabio Calvo studied the ancient medical works attributed to Hippocrates. These had been known only in part in the Middle Ages. Read as a whole (and translated into Latin), they offered an important new model for medicine based on close observation and unemotional, precise case histories (of which the Hippocratic texts contained a good many). Anatomists like Juan Valverde de Amusco and Bartolomeo Eustachi followed the lead of Andreas Vesalius, basing their accounts of human bones and blood vessels on the direct evidence they found by dissection, and publishing their results, magnificently illustrated, as improvements on Vesalius's work. Now you should go back to the Main Hall, but you might have another look at Medicine and Biology.