Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: In 1543, a Flemish physician named Andreas Vesalius published a book that would become the foundational text of modern anatomy.
Speaker: It was the product of a new kind of observational science that Vesalius was pioneering.
Speaker: And this volume exerted a really extraordinary influence on the development of medicine, biology, and the scientific method.
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.
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.
Speaker: And that is pretty exciting by itself.
Speaker: But thanks to a discovery that was made just as recently as 2007,
Speaker: This particular copy of the Fabrica is truly revelatory, for a very surprising reason that we're going to talk all about.
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.
Speaker: And I'm thrilled to be partnering with Christie's to bring you this extraordinary story.
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.
Speaker: Rhiannon, thanks for joining me on Curious Objects.
Speaker: Thanks very much for having me.
Speaker: Okay, so let's start with some rapid fire questions.
Speaker: Are you ready?
Speaker: I guess so.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: We'll find out soon enough.
Speaker: What's the oldest manuscript you've ever handled?
Speaker: I guess I've technically handled a cuneiform tablet.
Speaker: That's probably the oldest thing.
Speaker: Like an ancient Babylonian tablet.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess that technically counts as a manuscript, so I'll take it.
Speaker: Okay, what's the most valuable book you've ever touched?
Speaker: I'm trying to remember if I've actually touched a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, which would be the most valuable book.
Speaker: thing that I have, um, attached.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Wait, what's the Columbus letter?
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.
Speaker: How much did that sell for?
Speaker: Uh, just under $4 million.
Speaker: Okay, you have now been banned from books and manuscripts, and you have to pick a new specialty.
Speaker: What is it?
Speaker: I would become a Latin teacher.
Speaker: Oh, nice.
Speaker: Okay, I hope you don't correct my Latin pronunciation from a minute ago.
Speaker: No, no, I'm, you know, it's a language with a long life.
Speaker: So, you know, people have their own spins on it.
Speaker: That's very generous of you.
Speaker: I'm not sure if my high school Latin teacher would feel the same way.
Speaker: What movie has the most interesting depiction of rare books or manuscripts?
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
Speaker: rare book caper involving Renaissance books about Satan.
Speaker: And is one of the only books I can think of that really depicts bibliography as an action adventure.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Johnny Depp, I never would have guessed.
Speaker: I have to go check that out.
Speaker: It's definitely worth it.
Speaker: What's your favorite museum to visit?
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.
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.
Speaker: What do you love about that museum?
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.
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.
Speaker: Fascinating.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: We're going to have to get into that in another episode.
Speaker: It's about time we did a sloth dedicated curious objects episode.
Speaker: What's a misconception that people have about your field that you'd like to correct?
Speaker: For me, so my specialty is really early printed books and things kind of from the first few centuries of printing.
Speaker: And people are often surprised when they see them that they're in such good condition.
Speaker: People think, oh, if something is old, it must be sort of decrepit.
Speaker: I think in part because the old books that most people encounter are from the 19th century, which actually
Speaker: you know, was a period of industrialization and bookmaking where they were making things with acidic paper.
Speaker: They were sort of using new chemicals that it seemed very promising, but which actually sort of decay and crumble very quickly.
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
Speaker: just pristine.
Speaker: Like they, they look like they just came off the press.
Speaker: Um, you know, they don't, they don't sort of decay.
Speaker: They're not musty and dirty.
Speaker: They're, they're like very fresh and beautiful.
Speaker: Oh, that's really interesting.
Speaker: I guess they, they really don't make them like they used to.
Speaker: Definitely not.
Speaker: What's a book that, um, that an amateur should read to start to understand your field?
Speaker: Um, well, this is one of my favorites, which I think is a lesser known, um,
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.
Speaker: And she worked at Brown University, but also at NYPL.
Speaker: And she wrote this book that is essentially an introduction to
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
Speaker: I went to London actually last January.
Speaker: We had a big meeting of all the books departments.
Speaker: So at Christie's, there's a books department based in New York, London and Paris.
Speaker: And we all work together very closely.
Speaker: And every once in a while, we try to all get together in one place so we can kind of
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.
Speaker: Um, so we did that and we went to Oxford together and visited some libraries and had some, some good fair book adventures.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that.
Speaker: Uh, it was very fun.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Some, some, uh, late nights cause a few of our colleagues, uh,
Speaker: went to the University of Oxford, so they were able to relive some aspects of their students.
Speaker: The glory days.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What's the coolest discovery that you've ever made about a book?
Speaker: So it was one of the first sales that I cataloged for Christie's.
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.
Speaker: although he thought of it in a slightly different way.
Speaker: And it was a very pristine copy in a vellum binding.
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.
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?
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.
Speaker: It didn't immediately strike me that it was a person's name.
Speaker: But on a completely separate reason.
Speaker: You just thought that it actually belonged to the Archangel Gabriel.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, well, I didn't, you know, I'm not sure what it was.
Speaker: So I just kind of filed it away.
Speaker: And then I was reading for a different project.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: And it's all about his student days visiting Etna with his best friend, Angelo Gabriele.
Speaker: And it turns out that this was very, very likely Angelo's copy of this book.
Speaker: Although I can tell you it doesn't look like you read it very closely because it basically looked pristine.
Speaker: Maybe he just turned the pages very carefully.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: He just took very good care of his books.
Speaker: What's a mistake that you've made in the field that you regret or perhaps learn something from or both?
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.
Speaker: So the catalog came out and it didn't describe this really important feature of the book, which does really increase the value.
Speaker: And I didn't figure it out until quite close to the actual sale date.
Speaker: And I took it to my boss and was like, do you think that this is right?
Speaker: And they were like, oh, yes, we should have put that in the catalog.
Speaker: But in the end, we were able to make a sale room notice about it.
Speaker: And other people hadn't noticed it, of course, who had come to see it.
Speaker: And it did end up, I think it is the record auction copy for that book.
Speaker: All's well that ends well.
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.
Speaker: Yes, I don't, you know, that might have happened to me and I just blocked it out.
Speaker: Fair enough.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Teach me how, because I'd love to forget that.
Speaker: What was the last book you saw that gave you shivers?
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: Well, we're about to talk about one that has kind of given me shivers, the Vesalius.
Speaker: But I also, I just cataloged this really, really incredible copy of the first printed edition of Euclid, this mathematical text.
Speaker: It was printed in the 15th century by Ratdole, who was the kind of great pioneer of scientific printing.
Speaker: One of the first people to really integrate scientific diagrams into printed books about science.
Speaker: which was kind of difficult at the time, especially these geometric diagrams.
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.
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.
Speaker: And this one has a lot of annotations.
Speaker: concentrated around the book 10, which is famously one of the most difficult ones.
Speaker: And in fact, they have written on one of the pages, this is the most difficult book in Latin.
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
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.
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.
Speaker: And in this case, it's nice when you can really get a handle on what they were grappling with.
Speaker: Wow.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, it's definitely... Annotated books, I think, are something that has become more of interest.
Speaker: In various periods of book collecting, annotations were seen as something that you might wish, in fact, were not there.
Speaker: They're cluttering up the page.
Speaker: And still today, you find there are people who've
Speaker: feel quite vehemently about writing in books.
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.
Speaker: Okay, well, we'll be right back with Rhiannon and Noel.
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.
Speaker: The auction opens on January 16th and closes on February 2nd.
Speaker: If you'd like to get in touch and share your thoughts and comments and questions online,
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.
Speaker: I also love reading the reviews that you leave on Apple Podcasts.
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.
Speaker: Thanks to everyone who's left a review of the show.
Speaker: I appreciate that so much.
Speaker: And it's a big help for bringing new listeners to the program.
Speaker: If you haven't done that before, it's very easy.
Speaker: And I would be so grateful.
Speaker: Okay, Rhiannon, let's talk about Vesalius.
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.
Speaker: What does this book look like?
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.
Speaker: But this one, I was showing it to someone recently and I had to pick it up and carry it over to them.
Speaker: And it struck me almost for the first time that it's really gigantic.
Speaker: I have to kind of carry it with both hands in a sort of bear hug motion.
Speaker: And it takes up quite a bit of my torso.
Speaker: So it's a quite imposing large folio book.
Speaker: Although not necessarily unusual for that type of book from the period.
Speaker: And so the pages themselves must be large.
Speaker: How do you actually turn those?
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.
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
Speaker: risks to early printed books, which are otherwise, you know, objects that are made to be used and handled by people.
Speaker: And this one, you know, it's quite big.
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.
Speaker: It's like your face is like right in there.
Speaker: And you can sort of just travel through it and it's really nice.
Speaker: So give us a little bit of context here.
Speaker: I want to start with who Vesalius was.
Speaker: Can you just give us a bit of a synopsis of his biography up to the point where he started writing this book?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Vesalius, Andreas Vesalius, and by the way, his last name actually means weasel in Latin.
Speaker: And he has a very cute coat of arms with three little weasels on it.
Speaker: But he was born in 1514, and he was from a long line of doctors and medical professionals.
Speaker: I think his father was an apothecary, and his grandfather and great-grandfather were both very well-respected physicians.
Speaker: And he grew up in Brussels.
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.
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.
Speaker: And unfortunately, after kind of distinguishing himself there for quite a while, he had to leave when Charles V invaded France.
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.
Speaker: And essentially, as soon as he passed his exams, they made him a professor of surgery there.
Speaker: That gives you an idea of what type of person he was.
Speaker: And he was only about 23 years old.
Speaker: So he was kind of a wunderkind.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So that was not common for a 23-year-old to be made a surgeon.
Speaker: I think that in general, you know, kids started education much earlier then.
Speaker: But the fact that he kind of like sailed through things, despite the fact that his education was partially interrupted by this war.
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.
Speaker: And then, you know, to essentially get offered a job the day that
Speaker: you pass your exams as any millennial's dream.
Speaker: Yes, we all be so fortunate.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
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.
Speaker: But let's pretend for a moment that you didn't, that you just came across this book without any prior knowledge about it.
Speaker: You open it up, you start looking through it.
Speaker: What would you notice about it?
Speaker: I think the first thing that you notice about it is that somebody has scribbled all over it.
Speaker: It's got over a thousand annotations and little edit marks.
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.
Speaker: But it's extremely detailed engagement with the text.
Speaker: So things are crossed out.
Speaker: New phrases are written in above them in Latin.
Speaker: Passages are moved around with little arrows.
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.
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
Speaker: editing their own text, basically.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And is that so that the book, of course, it has text, but it also has some very famous illustrations.
Speaker: Are the annotations just on the text or are they on the images as well?
Speaker: No, they're on both.
Speaker: The majority of the annotations are to the text.
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.
Speaker: So this is actually the second edition of Vesalius' Fabrica, not the first edition.
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.
Speaker: Also, you know, the text is really being engaged with
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.
Speaker: So there are also some annotations to the images.
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.
Speaker: Right.
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.
Speaker: This is something very different.
Speaker: I mean, it sounds like an editor going through and correcting a draft.
Speaker: What, you know, as you look at these annotations and study them, what is revealed?
Speaker: What can you infer about the person who wrote them?
Speaker: Well, in the end, I think it becomes obvious that surely these are only annotations you would write if you were the author.
Speaker: I mean, in some cases, there are updates to sentences that describe Vesalius' own experiences.
Speaker: He talks about having seen the practice of circumcision at Padua in Venice.
Speaker: And then he changes the...
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.
Speaker: And there's one place where he's crossed out his father's name.
Speaker: His father had the same name as him, so he's decided just saying, my father is enough.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, wow.
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.
Speaker: But is that, are there ways of confirming that?
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.
Speaker: So by comparing the handwriting there, you can look and see that it very clearly is the same person.
Speaker: There's actually another...
Speaker: book that survives that is annotated by him, which Christie sold in 1998.
Speaker: Although that was from very early in his career.
Speaker: And you can sort of see not only the similarity of the handwriting, but there's a sort of similar habit of correction.
Speaker: You know, it's like he's got a system that he's using.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And that seems to have survived through his career.
Speaker: Yeah, although he did it quite a bit.
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.
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.
Speaker: as a court physician at the court of Charles V to whom the book is dedicated.
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.
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
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...
Speaker: behaving out of line, not being courteous enough to his elders, treating medical tradition in a disrespectful way.
Speaker: So he basically got a new job and describes burning all of his manuscripts and many of his books before he left Italy.
Speaker: And he mentions that he somewhat regrets this.
Speaker: It was sort of a fit of pique.
Speaker: Good Lord.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So this is incredibly cool.
Speaker: We're now talking about a book that one of the most interesting, important books in medical history.
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.
Speaker: Can you give me a sense of just how significant that discovery is?
Speaker: Yeah, well, on multiple levels, I think it is certainly one of the most incredible objects I've been able to handle.
Speaker: From a scholarly perspective, it's also quite important.
Speaker: And the book has been on deposit at the Fisher Library since its discovery,
Speaker: and has had work done on it in our publications describing some of what the annotations depict.
Speaker: And essentially what this is is his notes for a third edition that was never realized.
Speaker: So there were really only two editions of this text in his lifetime, 1543 and 1555.
Speaker: And what this book is is he probably was sent the proof sheets from the printer
Speaker: before the whole thing was even fully completed.
Speaker: And the idea is he was supposed to go through it and identify errors.
Speaker: And then he would send the list of errors back to the publisher.
Speaker: And that would become the errata list, which is something you see in a lot of printed books.
Speaker: And he seems to have just kept it for a really long time, probably unbound, just loose in sheets and,
Speaker: kind of worked out the development of his thought in the margins and in between the lines.
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.
Speaker: The third edition was never printed because he died actually quite young.
Speaker: So this is kind of all we have of what would have been the third edition.
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
Speaker: something of information and thought that otherwise would have been lost.
Speaker: And it's from a period of Vasilis' life we don't know that much about.
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.
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.
Speaker: I mean, I mentioned that the auction estimate is $800,000 to $1.2 million.
Speaker: What do you think that number would be if you were selling a similar book but without the annotations?
Speaker: Well, the last copy of the second edition that we sold at Christie's sold for about 43,000 pounds.
Speaker: So it's a big premium.
Speaker: But in a way, this can also be considered essentially a quite substantial manuscript of Vesalius.
Speaker: It's a printed book, but it has so much writing from him in it.
Speaker: And that is material that, you know, was thought essentially not really not to exist anymore.
Speaker: And, you know, anything that survived essentially besides that one other book is an institutional collection.
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And as you mentioned, Vesalius manuscripts in general are very rare.
Speaker: So it's quite a special thing to be able to get your hands on one.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, essentially almost impossible.
Speaker: This is your chance.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So and let's get into the context around why this book and Vesalius himself are so important in the first place.
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.
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?
Speaker: Well, it's interesting.
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...
Speaker: coming up into school and entering the profession at a really incredibly exciting time for the study of medicine in Europe.
Speaker: The early 16th century, Europe has just learned about the entire existence of the Americas.
Speaker: There's a real shift in people's relationship to knowledge and their relationship in particular to the received tradition from antiquity.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: And in 1528, the first printed edition of Galen's works in Greek came out from the Aldean Press.
Speaker: which was the same year that Vesalius began his education at Louvain before going to Paris.
Speaker: So there's this sense that there is so much to do and read.
Speaker: So in addition to kind of engaging deeply with this historic tradition,
Speaker: you know, he would have performed dissections and he was present at dissections in his education.
Speaker: So that would have been a big part of what was going on in Paris, particularly.
Speaker: So he would have attended public and private dissections.
Speaker: And actually he ended up working as a cutter, basically.
Speaker: So during this time, the professor who's kind of a more high status individual would lecture.
Speaker: And then there would be another person
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.
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.
Speaker: So he had a real
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So I want to get into this because one of the really extraordinary features of this book is the illustrations.
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
Speaker: of all of the structures and substructures of human beings.
Speaker: It's a little uncomfortable for anyone who has, you know, squeamishness about blood and gore and guts and muscles and things.
Speaker: But what is it that makes these illustrations so unusual for the time of,
Speaker: How did Vesalius have this insight into the human body?
Speaker: And, you know, let's just call a spade a spade.
Speaker: Where did the bodies come from?
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.
Speaker: Which is one reason why it was actually particularly difficult to get access to female bodies.
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.
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.
Speaker: Well, I'm not trying to like defend it.
Speaker: But there were some material reasons why there was less knowledge of the female body during this time.
Speaker: And the, I mean, they were, Vesalius tells stories about, you know, his student days,
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.
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.
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,
Speaker: like from a longstanding basis, right?
Speaker: It was an issue in the 19th century too.
Speaker: It's not a problem that they solved because of various cultural reasons.
Speaker: Most people didn't want their body to be treated that way after death.
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.
Speaker: And he's dissecting a woman's body,
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.
Speaker: And so the students basically like kind of
Speaker: sneak in to like get the body out of the ground so that they can have access to a female corpse.
Speaker: It's a, it's pretty unpleasant.
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,
Speaker: undressing of the human form.
Speaker: It's all men, but you have the first one who's
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.
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.
Speaker: Like they're in a real place.
Speaker: But as it goes on, the bodies, more parts have been sort of removed from the body.
Speaker: So you can see deeper and deeper inside.
Speaker: And you start to have, as part of the illustrations, the fact that they are actually tied up into these positions.
Speaker: You can see that there's a kind of structure holding them up.
Speaker: into the position.
Speaker: And that is how they think they would have actually been captured.
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.
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.
Speaker: You know, Vesalius had predecessors.
Speaker: There were other people who kind of had similar ideas to him.
Speaker: There's a Berengario de Carpi and Charles Estienne are two important precursors who did produce really interesting illustrated anatomical manuals.
Speaker: But the woodcuts are smaller.
Speaker: They're not as legible.
Speaker: Vesalius, they are so carefully thought out and presented at a size where you can really make out the details.
Speaker: And in addition to that, they're also...
Speaker: really remarkably beautiful if you can tolerate a certain amount of the macabre, but they are in like these kind of beautiful poses.
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.
Speaker: So speaking of the hunt for cadavers and human bodies to research, to study, you mentioned earlier that Vesalius died fairly young.
Speaker: When he was 49 years old, he actually died on a trip to Jerusalem.
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.
Speaker: I wonder if you could tell me about that story.
Speaker: he was going to the Holy Land on an errand for the Holy Roman Emperor.
Speaker: So it seems to have been a sort of totally above board activity.
Speaker: But he was a famous person who got in fights with a lot of people.
Speaker: He was a big personality and he died, you know, kind of under mysterious circumstances quite far from home.
Speaker: So that really invites, I think, a lot of rumor.
Speaker: So there was stories that kind of,
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.
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
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.
Speaker: So there's actually no evidence of that.
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.
Speaker: Because when he left and he took a job working for the emperor,
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.
Speaker: And the previous...
Speaker: I think, professor of surgery or an important anatomist at Padua had just died.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Speaker: And of course, the times were perfect for him, but other people lived then, other smart people.
Speaker: But Vesalius really, you know, he was a character.
Speaker: He clearly just had a real serious ambition and like clearness of thought about what he wanted to do that he
Speaker: led him to create this book, which he designed the layout for.
Speaker: He oversaw the creation of the illustrations.
Speaker: In a sort of almost totalizing way, he had this really clear vision of what he wanted.
Speaker: In addition to this really clear vision, he seemed to feel very comfortable critiquing Galen,
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.
Speaker: He was not able to do that.
Speaker: Um, in the Roman empire, he, he worked on animals, including probably some apes.
Speaker: Um, but many of his errors in his anatomical writings, um,
Speaker: seemed to have been linked to the fact that he never actually was dissecting human bodies.
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.
Speaker: And he had, you know, the chutzpah to do it, basically.
Speaker: And it made him a lot of enemies, I think, or, you know, people
Speaker: you know, he clearly had charisma and that can also invite things like rumor, right?
Speaker: Like he had a sort of larger than life career.
Speaker: And I think maybe to some degree, people wanted his death to be larger than life too.
Speaker: Yeah, fair enough.
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?
Speaker: So it was received, I think, with quite a lot of excitement.
Speaker: Like it was,
Speaker: At the time that it was published, it was essentially the most comprehensive description of the human body that had appeared.
Speaker: It's divided into seven books, which each kind of address a different part of the body.
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.
Speaker: And he specifically compares things.
Speaker: his illustrations to the kinds of diagrams that are, that will illustrate like a geometric text or a mathematical treatise.
Speaker: And he says in the introduction, he calls Galen divine.
Speaker: He says he's the prince of medicine.
Speaker: And he thanks a lot of his professors that he had worked with because he's still quite young.
Speaker: I think he's still in his 20s.
Speaker: And a lot of those people did not take it so well.
Speaker: There were some people who were really offended by not only Hesalius' kind of treatment of Galen,
Speaker: who although he gets compliments in the beginning, there are some places where Vassalius is actually quite mean about Galen.
Speaker: In a way that you might even think is a little unfair, considering Galen was just doing his best, you know.
Speaker: He'll write things like, I don't know what came into Galen's head when he wrote this.
Speaker: It gets a little mean.
Speaker: And yeah, the people...
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,
Speaker: you know, really too big for his britches, criticizing things that should not be criticized or not criticized in that way.
Speaker: Um, but of course all of this also speaks to the fact that the book was taken very seriously.
Speaker: And in fact, I mean, it, in some places seems to have like sold out very quickly.
Speaker: We can see people writing about it from a very early period.
Speaker: It kind of penetrated even into kind of the northern European region.
Speaker: Melanchthon, the reformer, wrote a poem about it and kind of incorporated into his works.
Speaker: I think people immediately recognized that it was important.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Wow.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, well, I mean, you know, being a doctor and collecting books is something that actually goes back quite a long ways.
Speaker: And there are lots of really incredible medical book collections that
Speaker: in the world, and this is sort of would be the crown jewel, I think, of any of them.
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.
Speaker: But I think that it does have a wider appeal in a way.
Speaker: The fact of Vesalius' relationship to the text that he's editing
Speaker: has a lot of implications, I think, even beyond the medical world.
Speaker: So in the annotations for this text,
Speaker: There's not a huge amount of new anatomical knowledge.
Speaker: He kind of had done a lot of that work already.
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.
Speaker: He's rearranging his Latin word order, picking new words,
Speaker: It's really something that speaks to just the whole humanist project of uncovering and communicating knowledge.
Speaker: So I think on that level, it even has a much wider interest than just the medical.
Speaker: You know, science, I think you could say, is kind of a process of annotating, right?
Speaker: I mean,
Speaker: Vesalius is commentating and correcting Galen.
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.
Speaker: He gives himself the same treatment.
Speaker: He's rewriting everything.
Speaker: There's no detail too small to correct for him.
Speaker: He's so passionate about getting it right.
Speaker: And I think that there's something that speaks to the whole
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.
Speaker: It's really kind of one of the most intimate objects in that way that I have handled.
Speaker: Um,
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.
Speaker: And so you feel that you can be a part of that conversation, which is really special.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: Well, Rhiannon, Noel, thanks so much for being with me and for sharing your scholarship and your insight into this fantastic volume.
Speaker: Best of luck with the sale.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Ben.
Speaker: It was great.
Speaker: Once again, the auction is at Christie's New York.
Speaker: The bidding is opening on January 16th and closes on February 2nd.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit and I'm Ben Miller.
