Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Marginalia That Made Christie's Value This Book at $1 Million
29 Plays1 year ago
In 1543 Andreas Vesalius published a seven-part book that would become the foundational text of modern anatomy: On the Fabric of the Human Body. With it, the Flemish anatomist overturned more than a millennium’s worth of medical dogma, many of his breakthroughs coming while dissecting human corpses—a method of study unavailable to physicians of classical antiquity. Part education and part art, Vesalius’s illustrated anatomy is as respected today for its woodcut specimen drawings—flayed “muscle men” and skeletons who pose like figures from medieval paintings—as for its no-nonsense organization . . . and it might have been even better. In this week’s episode, Benjamin Miller speaks with Rhiannon Knol, specialist at Christie’s, which is currently offering Vesalius’s own annotated copy of his book’s second edition. Its margins dark with suggestions—in Latin—for transposition, rephrasing, and new contextual information, this fascinating document of medical history hints at what a third edition would have offered, if not for Vesalius’s untimely death in 1564.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Vesalius and the Fabrica
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:12
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:14
Speaker
In 1543, a Flemish physician named Andreas Vesalius published a book that would become the foundational text of modern
Publication of De Humani Corporis Fabrica, 1543
00:00:22
Speaker
anatomy.
00:00:22
Speaker
It was the product of a new kind of observational science that Vesalius was pioneering.
00:00:27
Speaker
And this volume exerted a really extraordinary influence on the development of medicine, biology, and the scientific method.
00:00:35
Speaker
The book is called De Humani Corporis Fabrica, or Fabrica for short, which translates into English as On the Structure of the Human Body.
Auction of Rare Vesalius Copy
00:00:45
Speaker
Now, a rare copy of this book printed in 1555 is up for sale in the upcoming Fine Books and Important Manuscripts auction at Christie's New York, which ends on February 2nd.
00:00:57
Speaker
And that is pretty exciting by itself.
00:00:59
Speaker
But thanks to a discovery that was made just as recently as 2007,
00:01:04
Speaker
This particular copy of the Fabrica is truly revelatory, for a very surprising reason that we're going to talk all about.
00:01:12
Speaker
So the auction estimate is $800,000 to $1.2 million, and we're going to dig into why that is and what makes this book so compelling.
00:01:20
Speaker
And I'm thrilled to be partnering with Christie's to bring you this extraordinary story.
Interview with Rhiannon Knoll
00:01:24
Speaker
So to help us understand this book and the secrets it holds, I'm joined by Rhiannon Knoll, specialist in books and manuscripts at Christie's, and as she describes herself on Instagram, resident demonologist.
00:01:35
Speaker
Rhiannon, thanks for joining me on Curious Objects.
00:01:38
Speaker
Thanks very much for having me.
00:01:41
Speaker
Okay, so let's start with some rapid fire questions.
00:01:43
Speaker
Are you ready?
00:01:44
Speaker
I guess so.
00:01:45
Speaker
Yes.
00:01:45
Speaker
We'll find out soon enough.
00:01:48
Speaker
What's the oldest manuscript you've ever handled?
00:01:50
Speaker
I guess I've technically handled a cuneiform tablet.
00:01:53
Speaker
That's probably the oldest thing.
00:01:56
Speaker
Like an ancient Babylonian tablet.
00:01:58
Speaker
Yeah, I guess that technically counts as a manuscript, so I'll take it.
00:02:03
Speaker
Okay, what's the most valuable book you've ever touched?
00:02:06
Speaker
I'm trying to remember if I've actually touched a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, which would be the most valuable book.
00:02:12
Speaker
thing that I have, um, attached.
00:02:15
Speaker
The most valuable, yeah, the most valuable book that I have sold at Christie's is a copy of the Columbus letter, which I can remember because it just happened a few months ago.
00:02:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:26
Speaker
Wait, what's the Columbus letter?
Rhiannon's Passion for Rare Books
00:02:28
Speaker
Uh, the Columbus letter is the first printed account of, or one of the very early printed accounts of, uh, Columbus's, um, first visit to the Americas.
00:02:38
Speaker
How much did that sell for?
00:02:40
Speaker
Uh, just under $4 million.
00:02:42
Speaker
Okay, you have now been banned from books and manuscripts, and you have to pick a new specialty.
00:02:49
Speaker
What is it?
00:02:49
Speaker
I would become a Latin teacher.
00:02:52
Speaker
Oh, nice.
00:02:54
Speaker
Okay, I hope you don't correct my Latin pronunciation from a minute ago.
00:02:58
Speaker
No, no, I'm, you know, it's a language with a long life.
00:03:03
Speaker
So, you know, people have their own spins on it.
00:03:07
Speaker
That's very generous of you.
00:03:10
Speaker
I'm not sure if my high school Latin teacher would feel the same way.
00:03:13
Speaker
What movie has the most interesting depiction of rare books or manuscripts?
00:03:21
Speaker
Well, the most famous example of a rare book movie, I think, is The Ninth Gate, which is a sort of unintentionally hilarious 90s movie starring Johnny Depp that has a sort of
00:03:35
Speaker
rare book caper involving Renaissance books about Satan.
00:03:39
Speaker
And is one of the only books I can think of that really depicts bibliography as an action adventure.
00:03:45
Speaker
Wow.
00:03:46
Speaker
Johnny Depp, I never would have guessed.
00:03:47
Speaker
I have to go check that out.
00:03:50
Speaker
It's definitely worth it.
00:03:52
Speaker
What's your favorite museum to visit?
00:03:54
Speaker
Well, in my whole life, actually, my favorite museum is the Natural History Museum at the Smithsonian, D.C., which I grew up going to.
00:04:03
Speaker
which doesn't have any rare books, but I used to spend a lot of time there as a kid, and I feel that it has had various influences on my attraction to old stuff that I'm always still discovering.
00:04:15
Speaker
What do you love about that museum?
00:04:19
Speaker
Well, my favorite part of it when I was a child was the Ice Age megafauna room, which is the skeletons of mammoths and mastodons and also the giant ground sloth.
00:04:32
Speaker
which is probably not a story that I need to go into on this podcast, but like the sloth, the history of sloths has had an ongoing interest to me in the rare book world, which I feel like started in that room.
00:04:46
Speaker
Fascinating.
00:04:46
Speaker
Okay.
00:04:46
Speaker
We're going to have to get into that in another episode.
Surprising Durability of Old Books
00:04:50
Speaker
It's about time we did a sloth dedicated curious objects episode.
00:04:55
Speaker
What's a misconception that people have about your field that you'd like to correct?
00:05:02
Speaker
For me, so my specialty is really early printed books and things kind of from the first few centuries of printing.
00:05:10
Speaker
And people are often surprised when they see them that they're in such good condition.
00:05:15
Speaker
People think, oh, if something is old, it must be sort of decrepit.
00:05:19
Speaker
I think in part because the old books that most people encounter are from the 19th century, which actually
00:05:25
Speaker
you know, was a period of industrialization and bookmaking where they were making things with acidic paper.
00:05:32
Speaker
They were sort of using new chemicals that it seemed very promising, but which actually sort of decay and crumble very quickly.
00:05:38
Speaker
Whereas, you know, a book from the 15th century on linen rag paper, you know, if it hasn't been set on fire or dunked in water, it can look
00:05:48
Speaker
just pristine.
00:05:49
Speaker
Like they, they look like they just came off the press.
00:05:52
Speaker
Um, you know, they don't, they don't sort of decay.
00:05:54
Speaker
They're not musty and dirty.
00:05:56
Speaker
They're, they're like very fresh and beautiful.
00:05:58
Speaker
Oh, that's really interesting.
00:05:59
Speaker
I guess they, they really don't make them like they used to.
00:06:02
Speaker
Definitely not.
00:06:04
Speaker
What's a book that, um, that an amateur should read to start to understand your field?
00:06:10
Speaker
Um, well, this is one of my favorites, which I think is a lesser known, um,
00:06:16
Speaker
book, which is a little old, but it's called Incunabula and Americana by a famous American bibliographer named Margaret Stillwell, who was actually the first woman professor at Brown.
00:06:28
Speaker
And she worked at Brown University, but also at NYPL.
Rhiannon's Book Adventures and Discoveries
00:06:32
Speaker
And she wrote this book that is essentially an introduction to
00:06:36
Speaker
bibliography both of early printing but also of the earliest books printed in and about the Americas which are two fields often viewed as being separate but they happen to be the two things she had worked in and she kind of points out the material similarities between them and the kind of similar habits of thought necessary to work with them I think it's a really great book that sounds fantastic could you just say the title one more time it's Incunabula and Americana cool what was your last international trip
00:07:06
Speaker
I went to London actually last January.
00:07:09
Speaker
We had a big meeting of all the books departments.
00:07:11
Speaker
So at Christie's, there's a books department based in New York, London and Paris.
00:07:18
Speaker
And we all work together very closely.
00:07:20
Speaker
And every once in a while, we try to all get together in one place so we can kind of
00:07:25
Speaker
you know, you know, bond, I guess, but also just talk about kind of the state of things and how we're all doing and what we want to accomplish.
00:07:34
Speaker
Um, so we did that and we went to Oxford together and visited some libraries and had some, some good fair book adventures.
00:07:40
Speaker
Wow.
00:07:41
Speaker
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that.
00:07:42
Speaker
Uh, it was very fun.
00:07:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:45
Speaker
Some, some, uh, late nights cause a few of our colleagues, uh,
00:07:49
Speaker
went to the University of Oxford, so they were able to relive some aspects of their students.
00:07:54
Speaker
The glory days.
00:07:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:57
Speaker
What's the coolest discovery that you've ever made about a book?
00:08:00
Speaker
So it was one of the first sales that I cataloged for Christie's.
00:08:04
Speaker
I started as a junior specialist, and I had a copy of the first Aldine edition of Lucretius, this ancient poem that's famous because it sort of discusses what we think of as atomism.
00:08:17
Speaker
although he thought of it in a slightly different way.
00:08:19
Speaker
And it was a very pristine copy in a vellum binding.
00:08:23
Speaker
And at the time, vellum can be quite hard to date, but I would recognize now, I think, that it was essentially the original wrapper of this book, but at the time I just knew it was a kind of early binding.
00:08:33
Speaker
And on the inside of the binding, someone had written in pen, Angele Gabriele, which in Latin just is the genitive or possessive for the angel Gabriel, right?
00:08:45
Speaker
And, you know, people write a lot of weird stuff in books that doesn't necessarily have a lot of meaning to anyone now.
00:08:50
Speaker
It didn't immediately strike me that it was a person's name.
00:08:54
Speaker
But on a completely separate reason.
00:08:56
Speaker
You just thought that it actually belonged to the Archangel Gabriel.
00:09:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:01
Speaker
You know, well, I didn't, you know, I'm not sure what it was.
00:09:04
Speaker
So I just kind of filed it away.
00:09:07
Speaker
And then I was reading for a different project.
00:09:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:12
Speaker
and the Renaissance tech called De Etna by Pietro Bembo, who was a friend of Aldo's minutiae and kind of a member of the humanist milieu in that time.
00:09:22
Speaker
And it's all about his student days visiting Etna with his best friend, Angelo Gabriele.
00:09:31
Speaker
And it turns out that this was very, very likely Angelo's copy of this book.
00:09:35
Speaker
Although I can tell you it doesn't look like you read it very closely because it basically looked pristine.
00:09:42
Speaker
Maybe he just turned the pages very carefully.
00:09:44
Speaker
It's true.
00:09:44
Speaker
He just took very good care of his books.
00:09:47
Speaker
What's a mistake that you've made in the field that you regret or perhaps learn something from or both?
00:09:53
Speaker
Well, interestingly, that story also applies as a big mistake that I've made because, of course, I didn't realize it in time for the printed catalog.
00:10:03
Speaker
So the catalog came out and it didn't describe this really important feature of the book, which does really increase the value.
00:10:10
Speaker
And I didn't figure it out until quite close to the actual sale date.
00:10:14
Speaker
And I took it to my boss and was like, do you think that this is right?
00:10:18
Speaker
And they were like, oh, yes, we should have put that in the catalog.
00:10:22
Speaker
But in the end, we were able to make a sale room notice about it.
00:10:25
Speaker
And other people hadn't noticed it, of course, who had come to see it.
00:10:31
Speaker
And it did end up, I think it is the record auction copy for that book.
Learning from Cataloging Mistakes
00:10:36
Speaker
All's well that ends well.
00:10:37
Speaker
Actually, that's still a lot better than what often happens to me, which is that I discover something about a piece after I've sold it.
00:10:45
Speaker
Yes, I don't, you know, that might have happened to me and I just blocked it out.
00:10:50
Speaker
Fair enough.
00:10:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:51
Speaker
Teach me how, because I'd love to forget that.
00:10:55
Speaker
What was the last book you saw that gave you shivers?
00:11:00
Speaker
Hmm.
00:11:02
Speaker
Well, we're about to talk about one that has kind of given me shivers, the Vesalius.
00:11:07
Speaker
But I also, I just cataloged this really, really incredible copy of the first printed edition of Euclid, this mathematical text.
00:11:17
Speaker
It was printed in the 15th century by Ratdole, who was the kind of great pioneer of scientific printing.
00:11:23
Speaker
One of the first people to really integrate scientific diagrams into printed books about science.
00:11:29
Speaker
which was kind of difficult at the time, especially these geometric diagrams.
00:11:33
Speaker
But this copy is particularly nice because it is really, really heavily annotated by at least two people and someone not just going through it, because what Euclid is, Euclid's Elements is essentially a geometry textbook.
00:11:46
Speaker
And it starts off simple and you should be able to kind of theoretically start from the beginning and teach yourself geometry, reading it and working through the proofs.
00:11:54
Speaker
And this one has a lot of annotations.
00:11:58
Speaker
concentrated around the book 10, which is famously one of the most difficult ones.
00:12:04
Speaker
And in fact, they have written on one of the pages, this is the most difficult book in Latin.
00:12:11
Speaker
You can kind of see them really like working through geometry and kind of grappling with the text in a really interesting way that you don't always, you know, a lot of annotations
00:12:22
Speaker
They can be exciting, but they don't always tell you what they want because annotations in a book are essentially a conversation between the reader and the book.
00:12:30
Speaker
And sometimes there's just things that, or the reader in themselves, you know, you don't, you're often missing essential context for what they were thinking or trying to communicate.
00:12:40
Speaker
And in this case, it's nice when you can really get a handle on what they were grappling with.
Insights from Annotated Books
00:12:46
Speaker
Wow.
00:12:47
Speaker
And what a great segue to bring annotations into the conversation, because the Vesalius book that we're going to talk about after the break is full of some of the most interesting annotations that I've ever heard of.
00:12:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's definitely... Annotated books, I think, are something that has become more of interest.
00:13:05
Speaker
In various periods of book collecting, annotations were seen as something that you might wish, in fact, were not there.
00:13:12
Speaker
They're cluttering up the page.
00:13:13
Speaker
And still today, you find there are people who've
00:13:16
Speaker
feel quite vehemently about writing in books.
00:13:19
Speaker
But in the fields of book history and book selling, the idea that annotations help tell the story of a book and people's engagement with it has really become more widely recognized.
00:13:35
Speaker
Okay, well, we'll be right back with Rhiannon and Noel.
Viewing the Fabrica and Auction Details
00:13:38
Speaker
First, just a reminder that you can see images at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast and, of course, at christies.com, where you can also bid online.
00:13:47
Speaker
The auction opens on January 16th and closes on February 2nd.
00:13:51
Speaker
If you'd like to get in touch and share your thoughts and comments and questions online,
00:13:55
Speaker
or your episode ideas with me, you can email those to me at curiousobjectspodcast at gmail.com, or you can find me on Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:14:06
Speaker
I also love reading the reviews that you leave on Apple Podcasts.
00:14:09
Speaker
One person recently left a review which called Curious Objects, quote, an inquisitive podcast that gives us everything Antiques Roadshow can't, which I love, especially because we recently did an episode about Antiques Roadshow.
00:14:22
Speaker
Thanks to everyone who's left a review of the show.
00:14:25
Speaker
I appreciate that so much.
00:14:26
Speaker
And it's a big help for bringing new listeners to the program.
00:14:29
Speaker
If you haven't done that before, it's very easy.
00:14:32
Speaker
And I would be so grateful.
00:14:37
Speaker
Okay, Rhiannon, let's talk about Vesalius.
00:14:40
Speaker
And I just want to start with the physical properties of this book to give listeners a sense of the actual object that we're talking about.
00:14:48
Speaker
What does this book look like?
00:14:52
Speaker
It's funny because I spend a lot of my time around books, so I think sometimes I'm pretty spoiled and I don't always know what is going to strike people about them.
00:15:01
Speaker
But this one, I was showing it to someone recently and I had to pick it up and carry it over to them.
00:15:06
Speaker
And it struck me almost for the first time that it's really gigantic.
00:15:11
Speaker
I have to kind of carry it with both hands in a sort of bear hug motion.
Vesalius' Background and Career
00:15:15
Speaker
And it takes up quite a bit of my torso.
00:15:18
Speaker
So it's a quite imposing large folio book.
00:15:21
Speaker
Although not necessarily unusual for that type of book from the period.
00:15:28
Speaker
And so the pages themselves must be large.
00:15:31
Speaker
How do you actually turn those?
00:15:34
Speaker
Yeah, well, you know, the big secret of Rare Book World and probably, you know, another misconception that people have about books is that you don't really need to handle them with gloves.
00:15:47
Speaker
as long as your hands are clean, it's much safer actually to handle them with your bare hands because you're less likely to tear them, which is one of the kind of major issues
00:15:57
Speaker
risks to early printed books, which are otherwise, you know, objects that are made to be used and handled by people.
00:16:05
Speaker
And this one, you know, it's quite big.
00:16:07
Speaker
You know, I have it on my desk and I sit up next to it and you can kind of feel buried in it.
00:16:11
Speaker
It's like your face is like right in there.
00:16:16
Speaker
And you can sort of just travel through it and it's really nice.
00:16:21
Speaker
So give us a little bit of context here.
00:16:24
Speaker
I want to start with who Vesalius was.
00:16:26
Speaker
Can you just give us a bit of a synopsis of his biography up to the point where he started writing this book?
00:16:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:34
Speaker
So Vesalius, Andreas Vesalius, and by the way, his last name actually means weasel in Latin.
00:16:41
Speaker
And he has a very cute coat of arms with three little weasels on it.
00:16:46
Speaker
But he was born in 1514, and he was from a long line of doctors and medical professionals.
00:16:51
Speaker
I think his father was an apothecary, and his grandfather and great-grandfather were both very well-respected physicians.
00:16:58
Speaker
And he grew up in Brussels.
00:17:00
Speaker
And in a family that clearly valued education, so he would have been educated at the School of the Brethren of the Common Life.
00:17:07
Speaker
And then he continued his studies at the University of Louvain and eventually the University of Paris, which was kind of the cutting edge place to be studying medicine at the time.
00:17:15
Speaker
And unfortunately, after kind of distinguishing himself there for quite a while, he had to leave when Charles V invaded France.
00:17:25
Speaker
So he went back to Louvain for a period of time and then ended up finishing his education at the University of Padua, which was also a very well-respected place to get your medical education.
00:17:35
Speaker
And essentially, as soon as he passed his exams, they made him a professor of surgery there.
00:17:39
Speaker
That gives you an idea of what type of person he was.
00:17:42
Speaker
And he was only about 23 years old.
00:17:44
Speaker
So he was kind of a wunderkind.
00:17:46
Speaker
Wow.
00:17:48
Speaker
So that was not common for a 23-year-old to be made a surgeon.
00:17:53
Speaker
I think that in general, you know, kids started education much earlier then.
00:18:00
Speaker
But the fact that he kind of like sailed through things, despite the fact that his education was partially interrupted by this war.
00:18:07
Speaker
You know, I think he was able to essentially fast track his exams and sort of coursework at Padua because he had spent all this time at the University of Paris.
00:18:19
Speaker
And then, you know, to essentially get offered a job the day that
00:18:23
Speaker
you pass your exams as any millennial's dream.
00:18:27
Speaker
Yes, we all be so fortunate.
00:18:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:31
Speaker
So we're going to get into the contents of the book in a bit, but I just want to start, again, going back to the physical object.
00:18:39
Speaker
And if you were to open this copy for the first time, of course, as you mentioned, you already had some background information about it when it first arrived at Christie's.
00:18:50
Speaker
But let's pretend for a moment that you didn't, that you just came across this book without any prior knowledge
Discovery of Vesalius' Annotations
00:18:57
Speaker
about it.
00:18:57
Speaker
You open it up, you start looking through it.
00:19:00
Speaker
What would you notice about it?
00:19:03
Speaker
I think the first thing that you notice about it is that somebody has scribbled all over it.
00:19:08
Speaker
It's got over a thousand annotations and little edit marks.
00:19:14
Speaker
And it's not just kind of marginal comments or underlining, which is something that you see with some frequency in early printed books.
00:19:22
Speaker
But it's extremely detailed engagement with the text.
00:19:25
Speaker
So things are crossed out.
00:19:28
Speaker
New phrases are written in above them in Latin.
00:19:32
Speaker
Passages are moved around with little arrows.
00:19:34
Speaker
There are editorial and printer's marks written in kind of instructing changes that are desired by the annotator as well as like new information added in the margins.
00:19:48
Speaker
And I think even if you don't know Latin or you don't know that much about it, in a way it's very recognizable because it looks just like somebody
00:19:58
Speaker
editing their own text, basically.
00:20:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:01
Speaker
And is that so that the book, of course, it has text, but it also has some very famous illustrations.
00:20:07
Speaker
Are the annotations just on the text or are they on the images as well?
00:20:11
Speaker
No, they're on both.
00:20:13
Speaker
The majority of the annotations are to the text.
00:20:18
Speaker
And I guess I don't know if this is like going too much into detail, but as as you mentioned, this is an edition from 1555.
00:20:28
Speaker
So this is actually the second edition of Vesalius' Fabrica, not the first edition.
00:20:34
Speaker
And in between the two editions, there were not very many changes to the illustrations, which had been kind of, I think, very, very deeply thought out before the first edition.
00:20:49
Speaker
Also, you know, the text is really being engaged with
00:20:57
Speaker
Most of the engagement is occurring with the text, even on the sentence level, using a different Latin noun that is a little more elegant or something like that.
00:21:09
Speaker
So there are also some annotations to the images.
00:21:12
Speaker
In a few cases, there are corrections or updates to shapes of anatomical structures, but quite a lot of the annotations and corrections to the woodcuts actually have to do with the legibility of the labels.
00:21:27
Speaker
Right.
00:21:28
Speaker
So even at first blush, it's pretty clear that these are not the sort of notes that an average reader would just be jotting down in the margins as they go through, you know, notes to themselves, underlining passages they like.
00:21:39
Speaker
This is something very different.
00:21:41
Speaker
I mean, it sounds like an editor going through and correcting a draft.
00:21:45
Speaker
What, you know, as you look at these annotations and study them, what is revealed?
00:21:53
Speaker
What can you infer about the person who wrote them?
00:21:56
Speaker
Well, in the end, I think it becomes obvious that surely these are only annotations you would write if you were the author.
00:22:07
Speaker
I mean, in some cases, there are updates to sentences that describe Vesalius' own experiences.
00:22:14
Speaker
He talks about having seen the practice of circumcision at Padua in Venice.
00:22:19
Speaker
And then he changes the...
00:22:22
Speaker
I think he changes it from the present tense to the past tense or something like that, like things that reflect his own experiences.
00:22:28
Speaker
And there's one place where he's crossed out his father's name.
00:22:32
Speaker
His father had the same name as him, so he's decided just saying, my father is enough.
00:22:39
Speaker
But there's these sort of almost intimate details that would be sort of bizarre to correct if you were not the person who wrote them in the first place.
00:22:47
Speaker
Yeah, wow.
00:22:48
Speaker
Okay, so there's some circumstantial evidence just right from the start that this marginalia may actually have been written by the author himself, which is incredible.
00:22:58
Speaker
But is that, are there ways of confirming that?
00:23:04
Speaker
Yeah, so actually a manuscript material from Vassalius is very rare, but I think there's a small number of his letters are held by a library.
00:23:14
Speaker
So by comparing the handwriting there, you can look and see that it very clearly is the same person.
00:23:22
Speaker
There's actually another...
00:23:24
Speaker
book that survives that is annotated by him, which Christie sold in 1998.
00:23:31
Speaker
Although that was from very early in his career.
00:23:33
Speaker
And you can sort of see not only the similarity of the handwriting, but there's a sort of similar habit of correction.
00:23:41
Speaker
You know, it's like he's got a system that he's using.
00:23:46
Speaker
Wow.
00:23:46
Speaker
And that seems to have survived through his career.
00:23:50
Speaker
Yeah, although he did it quite a bit.
00:23:53
Speaker
But one of the reasons why manuscript material from him is so rare is he discusses in one of his later works that after the Fabrica was published.
00:24:04
Speaker
So he when he he had the book printed and it was sort of an immediate insane success and he used it to get a job.
00:24:14
Speaker
as a court physician at the court of Charles V to whom the book is dedicated.
00:24:19
Speaker
So he immediately kind of has this book come out, gets a new job, and then he's getting attacked actually by a lot of his former colleagues.
00:24:32
Speaker
Like it was, it was sort of, I think everyone knew it was really important and a, and a kind of incredible thing, but
00:24:39
Speaker
Many of his colleagues and some of his former teachers, even people that he acknowledges in the introduction of the book in a glowing way, some of those people just really turned against him and thought that he was...
00:24:55
Speaker
behaving out of line, not being courteous enough to his elders, treating medical tradition in a disrespectful way.
00:25:04
Speaker
So he basically got a new job and describes burning all of his manuscripts and many of his books before he left Italy.
Impact and Controversy of Vesalius' Work
00:25:13
Speaker
And he mentions that he somewhat regrets this.
00:25:15
Speaker
It was sort of a fit of pique.
00:25:18
Speaker
Good Lord.
00:25:21
Speaker
Wow.
00:25:22
Speaker
So this is incredibly cool.
00:25:23
Speaker
We're now talking about a book that one of the most interesting, important books in medical history.
00:25:31
Speaker
And it actually has the handwritten notes of its author written throughout, not just one or two little notes, but sort of on many of the pages throughout the book.
00:25:43
Speaker
Can you give me a sense of just how significant that discovery is?
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, well, on multiple levels, I think it is certainly one of the most incredible objects I've been able to handle.
00:26:00
Speaker
From a scholarly perspective, it's also quite important.
00:26:03
Speaker
And the book has been on deposit at the Fisher Library since its discovery,
00:26:08
Speaker
and has had work done on it in our publications describing some of what the annotations depict.
00:26:16
Speaker
And essentially what this is is his notes for a third edition that was never realized.
00:26:22
Speaker
So there were really only two editions of this text in his lifetime, 1543 and 1555.
00:26:30
Speaker
And what this book is is he probably was sent the proof sheets from the printer
00:26:36
Speaker
before the whole thing was even fully completed.
00:26:38
Speaker
And the idea is he was supposed to go through it and identify errors.
00:26:42
Speaker
And then he would send the list of errors back to the publisher.
00:26:44
Speaker
And that would become the errata list, which is something you see in a lot of printed books.
00:26:49
Speaker
And he seems to have just kept it for a really long time, probably unbound, just loose in sheets and,
00:26:55
Speaker
kind of worked out the development of his thought in the margins and in between the lines.
00:27:01
Speaker
So over the course of quite a few years, I think probably revisiting the text again and again to rethink how he wanted to present his ideas.
00:27:10
Speaker
The third edition was never printed because he died actually quite young.
00:27:15
Speaker
So this is kind of all we have of what would have been the third edition.
00:27:21
Speaker
So in addition to being this kind of just remarkable object that kind of reveals the intimacy of Veselius with his own text and this kind of actual process of knowledge work and scientific discovery, it is a kind of survival of some sort
00:27:40
Speaker
something of information and thought that otherwise would have been lost.
00:27:45
Speaker
And it's from a period of Vasilis' life we don't know that much about.
00:27:49
Speaker
Yeah, and we're going to come back to the story of his death a bit later because that's sort of fascinating and a little bit mysterious.
00:27:57
Speaker
But just from a commercial perspective, as this is coming up for sale in a few weeks, I wonder how these marginalia affect the value of the book.
00:28:08
Speaker
I mean, I mentioned that the auction estimate is $800,000 to $1.2 million.
00:28:15
Speaker
What do you think that number would be if you were selling a similar book but without the annotations?
00:28:22
Speaker
Well, the last copy of the second edition that we sold at Christie's sold for about 43,000 pounds.
00:28:31
Speaker
So it's a big premium.
00:28:33
Speaker
But in a way, this can also be considered essentially a quite substantial manuscript of Vesalius.
00:28:42
Speaker
It's a printed book, but it has so much writing from him in it.
00:28:46
Speaker
And that is material that, you know, was thought essentially not really not to exist anymore.
00:28:51
Speaker
And, you know, anything that survived essentially besides that one other book is an institutional collection.
00:28:58
Speaker
So it's a really, truly unique object that is, you know, directly relevant to one of the most important stories in the history of science.
00:29:07
Speaker
Right.
00:29:07
Speaker
And as you mentioned, Vesalius manuscripts in general are very rare.
00:29:11
Speaker
So it's quite a special thing to be able to get your hands on one.
00:29:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, essentially almost impossible.
00:29:18
Speaker
This is your chance.
00:29:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:20
Speaker
Wow.
00:29:21
Speaker
So and let's get into the context around why this book and Vesalius himself are so important in the first place.
00:29:30
Speaker
And I wonder, you know, you described to us a bit about his education and his precociousness, you know, his graduation and entry into the medical field at a very young age.
00:29:46
Speaker
What did he have going for him in terms of his skills, in terms of his resources, his insight that set Vesalius apart from his contemporaries?
00:29:59
Speaker
Well, it's interesting.
00:30:01
Speaker
I think in a way, the biggest thing he had going for him, which other people had going for them too, but he was...
00:30:09
Speaker
coming up into school and entering the profession at a really incredibly exciting time for the study of medicine in Europe.
00:30:20
Speaker
The early 16th century, Europe has just learned about the entire existence of the Americas.
00:30:26
Speaker
There's a real shift in people's relationship to knowledge and their relationship in particular to the received tradition from antiquity.
00:30:37
Speaker
So at the same time that there is the Renaissance, you know, this deep engagement with texts from the past, there is also the unavoidable sense that there is much more than anyone had really dreamed about that needed to be understood and studied.
00:30:56
Speaker
Vivian Nutten, who's a real great scholar of this field, in his book Renaissance Medicine says that one of the things that was so exciting about this time was that it was possible to be modern and traditional at the same time.
00:31:10
Speaker
The background of all this is that there's an ancient medical writer named Galen who lived in the Roman Empire but was himself Greek and wrote in Greek.
00:31:23
Speaker
And in 1528, the first printed edition of Galen's works in Greek came out from the Aldean Press.
00:31:32
Speaker
which was the same year that Vesalius began his education at Louvain before going to Paris.
00:31:38
Speaker
So there's this sense that there is so much to do and read.
00:31:42
Speaker
So in addition to kind of engaging deeply with this historic tradition,
00:31:48
Speaker
you know, he would have performed dissections and he was present at dissections in his education.
00:31:55
Speaker
So that would have been a big part of what was going on in Paris, particularly.
00:32:00
Speaker
So he would have attended public and private dissections.
00:32:04
Speaker
And actually he ended up working as a cutter, basically.
00:32:07
Speaker
So during this time, the professor who's kind of a more high status individual would lecture.
00:32:14
Speaker
And then there would be another person
00:32:17
Speaker
student or sort of a barber surgeon type of person who would actually be doing the kind of dirty work of dissecting the body before the audience of students.
00:32:27
Speaker
So Vesalius did this work alongside his professor and tells many kind of hair-raising stories about what medical students got up to in Paris to get access to cadavers.
00:32:40
Speaker
So he had a real
00:32:42
Speaker
deep engagement with the history of medical thought in Europe, as well as this kind of like empirical drive to an experience of actually working with with corpses.
00:32:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:56
Speaker
Okay.
00:32:56
Speaker
So I want to get into this because one of the really extraordinary features of this book is the illustrations.
00:33:03
Speaker
And they're incredibly numerous and detailed depictions of the human body, depictions that could only have been made by someone with really intimate knowledge of
00:33:14
Speaker
of all of the structures and substructures of human beings.
00:33:20
Speaker
It's a little uncomfortable for anyone who has, you know, squeamishness about blood and gore and guts and muscles and things.
00:33:30
Speaker
But what is it that makes these illustrations so unusual for the time of,
00:33:37
Speaker
How did Vesalius have this insight into the human body?
00:33:42
Speaker
And, you know, let's just call a spade a spade.
00:33:47
Speaker
Where did the bodies come from?
00:33:51
Speaker
Well, on the question of where did the bodies come from, you know, you weren't really supposed to dissect bodies unless they were the bodies of criminals.
00:34:01
Speaker
Which is one reason why it was actually particularly difficult to get access to female bodies.
00:34:08
Speaker
So the kind of female medical knowledge for additional kind of upsetting, titillating reasons, I think, was also kind of this even more hidden knowledge because it was just difficult to get access to their bodies because they were executed less often.
00:34:23
Speaker
Wow, that's sort of a, that's turning on its head, the sort of many of the assumptions that people make about the history of sort of medical interest in men and women.
00:34:34
Speaker
Well, I'm not trying to like defend it.
00:34:38
Speaker
But there were some material reasons why there was less knowledge of the female body during this time.
00:34:46
Speaker
And the, I mean, they were, Vesalius tells stories about, you know, his student days,
00:34:52
Speaker
with other people who went on to be sort of famous where they're kind of essentially grave robbing, kind of going to the gallows to collect corpses and kind of keeping them in their dorm rooms, essentially, like very kind of disturbing things.
00:35:09
Speaker
And probably, I'm sure some actual, essentially grave robbing, because to get access to the bodies you needed to do your studies was difficult.
00:35:18
Speaker
You know, there weren't really enough legitimate bodies, which is why I think grave robbing has been kind of an unfortunate theme in medical education,
00:35:29
Speaker
like from a longstanding basis, right?
00:35:31
Speaker
It was an issue in the 19th century too.
00:35:32
Speaker
It's not a problem that they solved because of various cultural reasons.
00:35:39
Speaker
Most people didn't want their body to be treated that way after death.
00:35:44
Speaker
He even tells a story basically, like the famous illustrated title page of this book is a full page woodcut depicting Vesalius actually doing a dissection in front of a large audience.
00:35:56
Speaker
And he's dissecting a woman's body,
00:36:00
Speaker
And he does talk elsewhere about this kind of horrible caper that involved essentially the mistress of a monk who was killed, you know, because they were caught, you know, doing illicit sexual activity.
00:36:14
Speaker
And so the students basically like kind of
00:36:17
Speaker
sneak in to like get the body out of the ground so that they can have access to a female corpse.
00:36:24
Speaker
It's a, it's pretty unpleasant.
00:36:25
Speaker
I've got to say the, the illustrations, particularly the muscle men, which are the most, is the most famous series of illustrations from this, which is essentially 14 quite large full body woodcuts that depict this sort of gradual,
00:36:47
Speaker
undressing of the human form.
00:36:50
Speaker
It's all men, but you have the first one who's
00:36:55
Speaker
You know, he doesn't have skin, but otherwise he's like looking fairly human and strangely alive because they're in these kind of incredible classicizing, almost balladic poses.
00:37:07
Speaker
And they're in a landscape, which if you were to lay them all out next to each other, actually is a continuous panorama of the root between Padua and Vincenza.
00:37:19
Speaker
Like they're in a real place.
00:37:21
Speaker
But as it goes on, the bodies, more parts have been sort of removed from the body.
00:37:27
Speaker
So you can see deeper and deeper inside.
00:37:29
Speaker
And you start to have, as part of the illustrations, the fact that they are actually tied up into these positions.
00:37:36
Speaker
You can see that there's a kind of structure holding them up.
00:37:40
Speaker
into the position.
00:37:41
Speaker
And that is how they think they would have actually been captured.
00:37:45
Speaker
So the drawings, the original drawings would have been made, I don't know that you can say from life in this case, but the, you know, the corpses were kind of arranged into these crazy poses so that they could be captured.
00:38:01
Speaker
And I think that one of the reasons why they're famous is they're large and very detailed, which is one of the biggest innovations of the illustrations of this book.
00:38:14
Speaker
You know, Vesalius had predecessors.
00:38:16
Speaker
There were other people who kind of had similar ideas to him.
00:38:20
Speaker
There's a Berengario de Carpi and Charles Estienne are two important precursors who did produce really interesting illustrated anatomical manuals.
00:38:31
Speaker
But the woodcuts are smaller.
00:38:33
Speaker
They're not as legible.
00:38:36
Speaker
Vesalius, they are so carefully thought out and presented at a size where you can really make out the details.
00:38:46
Speaker
And in addition to that, they're also...
00:38:49
Speaker
really remarkably beautiful if you can tolerate a certain amount of the macabre, but they are in like these kind of beautiful poses.
00:38:56
Speaker
They're sort of showing off the human body, like the strength of the human body, the beauty of the human body, like everything that it does under the skin.
00:39:07
Speaker
So speaking of the hunt for cadavers and human bodies to research, to study, you mentioned earlier that Vesalius died fairly young.
00:39:19
Speaker
When he was 49 years old, he actually died on a trip to Jerusalem.
00:39:24
Speaker
And there were rumors that his death and his trip to Jerusalem might have actually been tied up in his hunt for human bodies.
00:39:35
Speaker
I wonder if you could tell me about that story.
00:39:37
Speaker
he was going to the Holy Land on an errand for the Holy Roman Emperor.
00:39:43
Speaker
So it seems to have been a sort of totally above board activity.
00:39:48
Speaker
But he was a famous person who got in fights with a lot of people.
00:39:54
Speaker
He was a big personality and he died, you know, kind of under mysterious circumstances quite far from home.
00:40:00
Speaker
So that really invites, I think, a lot of rumor.
00:40:04
Speaker
So there was stories that kind of,
00:40:06
Speaker
blossomed up quite early on that he had gone to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage to atone for some horrible crime that he had done.
00:40:18
Speaker
I think one of the stories is that he had tried to dissect a corpse but it turned out to still be alive so it had been a human vivisection which was really kind of in the horror movie territory and it
00:40:36
Speaker
So there was one side, which was that he's had to go to the Holy Land to atone for his terrible anatomical related crime.
00:40:45
Speaker
So there's actually no evidence of that.
00:40:48
Speaker
And on the other hand, there was lots of rumors that he was going to come back to Padua or he was going to come back to the university world.
00:40:57
Speaker
Because when he left and he took a job working for the emperor,
00:41:01
Speaker
you know, he was working as a physician, but he was no longer in this kind of academic environment where he had access to lots of cadavers relatively, where his job was sort of aimed at teaching and research, which seems like things that he really obviously deeply cared about.
00:41:18
Speaker
And the previous...
00:41:21
Speaker
I think, professor of surgery or an important anatomist at Padua had just died.
00:41:26
Speaker
So there was some thoughts that maybe Vesalius kind of had gone on this long journey as a way to sort of begin to unentangle himself from his role at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor.
00:41:39
Speaker
Okay, so it sounds like you don't necessarily believe the story about the vivisection and the sort of more macabre explanation for the trip.
00:41:49
Speaker
No, I think like one of his earlier biographers, Charles O'Malley, was kind of pointed out that there was not much evidence for this.
00:41:57
Speaker
But I think it kind of gets at another aspect of Vesalius, which you asked me, what did he really, what was he bringing that made him so remarkable and made him able to create this book?
00:42:09
Speaker
And of course, the times were perfect for him, but other people lived then, other smart people.
00:42:14
Speaker
But Vesalius really, you know, he was a character.
00:42:18
Speaker
He clearly just had a real serious ambition and like clearness of thought about what he wanted to do that he
00:42:29
Speaker
led him to create this book, which he designed the layout for.
00:42:33
Speaker
He oversaw the creation of the illustrations.
00:42:37
Speaker
In a sort of almost totalizing way, he had this really clear vision of what he wanted.
00:42:42
Speaker
In addition to this really clear vision, he seemed to feel very comfortable critiquing Galen,
00:42:50
Speaker
Um, you know, and other people did that, but Vesalius really approached it in a systematic way where he felt like it's not just Vesalia or it's not just that Galen is wrong sometimes, but his real argument was that Galen had not dissected human bodies.
00:43:06
Speaker
He was not able to do that.
00:43:07
Speaker
Um, in the Roman empire, he, he worked on animals, including probably some apes.
00:43:13
Speaker
Um, but many of his errors in his anatomical writings, um,
00:43:18
Speaker
seemed to have been linked to the fact that he never actually was dissecting human bodies.
00:43:24
Speaker
And so Vesalius kind of approaches him from that perspective, where it's not just like, well, I'm correcting one or two errors, but like this whole thing kind of needs an update.
00:43:34
Speaker
And he had, you know, the chutzpah to do it, basically.
00:43:38
Speaker
And it made him a lot of enemies, I think, or, you know, people
00:43:43
Speaker
you know, he clearly had charisma and that can also invite things like rumor, right?
00:43:48
Speaker
Like he had a sort of larger than
Legacy of the Fabrica
00:43:50
Speaker
life career.
00:43:50
Speaker
And I think maybe to some degree, people wanted his death to be larger than life too.
00:43:56
Speaker
Yeah, fair enough.
00:43:56
Speaker
Well, so when he published the Fabrica, how was that received and what sort of influence did that exert during his life and afterwards?
00:44:06
Speaker
So it was received, I think, with quite a lot of excitement.
00:44:10
Speaker
Like it was,
00:44:12
Speaker
At the time that it was published, it was essentially the most comprehensive description of the human body that had appeared.
00:44:19
Speaker
It's divided into seven books, which each kind of address a different part of the body.
00:44:25
Speaker
And there's an introduction where he discusses that an illustration can help you understand things in a way even better than text can sometimes.
00:44:33
Speaker
And he specifically compares things.
00:44:36
Speaker
his illustrations to the kinds of diagrams that are, that will illustrate like a geometric text or a mathematical treatise.
00:44:45
Speaker
And he says in the introduction, he calls Galen divine.
00:44:50
Speaker
He says he's the prince of medicine.
00:44:52
Speaker
And he thanks a lot of his professors that he had worked with because he's still quite young.
00:44:56
Speaker
I think he's still in his 20s.
00:44:59
Speaker
And a lot of those people did not take it so well.
00:45:03
Speaker
There were some people who were really offended by not only Hesalius' kind of treatment of Galen,
00:45:12
Speaker
who although he gets compliments in the beginning, there are some places where Vassalius is actually quite mean about Galen.
00:45:19
Speaker
In a way that you might even think is a little unfair, considering Galen was just doing his best, you know.
00:45:25
Speaker
He'll write things like, I don't know what came into Galen's head when he wrote this.
00:45:29
Speaker
It gets a little mean.
00:45:32
Speaker
And yeah, the people...
00:45:34
Speaker
including especially in Italy and some of his former colleagues in Paris, his teachers just really thought that he was behaving insanely, you know, that he was totally kind of like,
00:45:50
Speaker
you know, really too big for his britches, criticizing things that should not be criticized or not criticized in that way.
00:45:58
Speaker
Um, but of course all of this also speaks to the fact that the book was taken very seriously.
00:46:03
Speaker
And in fact, I mean, it, in some places seems to have like sold out very quickly.
00:46:08
Speaker
We can see people writing about it from a very early period.
00:46:13
Speaker
It kind of penetrated even into kind of the northern European region.
00:46:19
Speaker
Melanchthon, the reformer, wrote a poem about it and kind of incorporated into his works.
00:46:24
Speaker
I think people immediately recognized that it was important.
00:46:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:46:30
Speaker
Wow.
00:46:31
Speaker
So how can you imagine, I mean, considering that this volume is up for sale and that that's the reason we're talking about it now, I want to ask about how you imagine this book fitting into a collection or perhaps raising a collection to the next level.
00:46:46
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, being a doctor and collecting books is something that actually goes back quite a long ways.
00:46:55
Speaker
And there are lots of really incredible medical book collections that
00:47:00
Speaker
in the world, and this is sort of would be the crown jewel, I think, of any of them.
00:47:06
Speaker
You know, doctors have always kind of needed access to knowledge, and that's why this book was so important in the first place, and Vesalius is kind of the patron saint of the medical book.
00:47:18
Speaker
But I think that it does have a wider appeal in a way.
00:47:23
Speaker
The fact of Vesalius' relationship to the text that he's editing
00:47:30
Speaker
has a lot of implications, I think, even beyond the medical world.
00:47:33
Speaker
So in the annotations for this text,
00:47:38
Speaker
There's not a huge amount of new anatomical knowledge.
00:47:41
Speaker
He kind of had done a lot of that work already.
00:47:45
Speaker
You can see that what he's really interested in is how he's expressing himself and how to best communicate ideas to his readers and students and people who will come after him.
00:48:00
Speaker
He's rearranging his Latin word order, picking new words,
00:48:06
Speaker
It's really something that speaks to just the whole humanist project of uncovering and communicating knowledge.
00:48:17
Speaker
So I think on that level, it even has a much wider interest than just the medical.
00:48:23
Speaker
You know, science, I think you could say, is kind of a process of annotating, right?
00:48:29
Speaker
I mean,
00:48:30
Speaker
Vesalius is commentating and correcting Galen.
00:48:33
Speaker
Something I find so charming about this book is that although he's a bit mean about Galen, he kind of puts the same thing on himself.
00:48:44
Speaker
He gives himself the same treatment.
00:48:46
Speaker
He's rewriting everything.
00:48:47
Speaker
There's no detail too small to correct for him.
00:48:51
Speaker
He's so passionate about getting it right.
00:48:53
Speaker
And I think that there's something that speaks to the whole
00:48:56
Speaker
just project of science and human knowledge here to see someone, not just someone, but really one of the most important people in the history of science kind of wrestling, not only with the whole tradition, but with themselves.
00:49:13
Speaker
It's really kind of one of the most intimate objects in that way that I have handled.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:49:18
Speaker
Um,
00:49:20
Speaker
And the annotated books themselves are also something that people collect and that have a lot of interest just for these reasons where you suddenly get access to a kind of conversation between the annotator and the book itself, which in this case happens to be the same person.
00:49:38
Speaker
And so you feel that you can be a part of that conversation, which is really special.
00:49:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:44
Speaker
Fantastic.
00:49:45
Speaker
Well, Rhiannon, Noel, thanks so much for being with me and for sharing your scholarship and your insight into this fantastic volume.
00:49:53
Speaker
Best of luck with the sale.
00:49:55
Speaker
Thank you so much, Ben.
00:49:56
Speaker
It was great.
00:49:58
Speaker
Once again, the auction is at Christie's New York.
00:50:01
Speaker
The bidding is opening on January 16th and closes on February 2nd.
00:50:11
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
00:50:17
Speaker
Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
00:50:21
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit and I'm Ben Miller.