"In this work on the discovery and therapeutic use of the china root in the treatment of syphilis, Vesalius described the first attempt to formulate methods of identification of an exotic drug. He also offered physicians an opportunity to determine whether or not a drug coming into common use might be adulterated. The work contains Vesalius's defense of his anatomical methods and doctrines as described in the Fabrica (No. 375), as well as important autobiographical data."--Garrison & Morton (1991).
This book provides the first annotated English translation from the original Latin of Andreas Vesalius' China Root Epistle. Ostensibly his appraisal of a fashionable herbal remedy, the China Root Epistle concentrates on Vesalius' skeptical appraisal of traditional Galenic anatomy, which was based on animal rather than human dissections. Along with reflections about his life as a young anatomist, Vesalius argued that the new science of anatomy should devote itself less to rhetorical polemics and more to the craft of direct observation based on human dissection. This volume provides annotations to link the Epistle with Vesalius' earlier and more famous work, On the Fabric of the Human Body, and includes illustrations from the famous woodcuts first used in the 1543 edition of the Fabrica.
Winner of the Third Neu-Whitrow Prize (2021) granted by the Commission on Bibliography and Documentation of IUHPS-DHST Additional background information This book provides bibliographic information, ownership records, a detailed worldwide census and a description of the handwritten annotations for all the surviving copies of the 1543 and 1555 editions of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica. It also offers a groundbreaking historical analysis of how the Fabrica traveled across the globe, and how readers studied, annotated and critiqued its contents from 1543 to 2017. The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius sheds a fresh light on the book’s vibrant reception history and documents how physicians, artists, theologians and collectors filled its pages with copious annotations. It also offers a novel interpretation of how an early anatomical textbook became one of the most coveted rare books for collectors in the 21st century.
In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.
Definitive edition features 96 of the best plates from the great anatomist's Renaissance treasures. Reproduced from a rare edition, with a discussion of the illustrations, biographical sketch of Vesalius, annotations, and translations.
An awe-inspiring fusion of art and science, this magnificent collection features detailed illustrations of human anatomy by history's most brilliant artists. Includes over 130 black-and-white renderings of muscles, skeletons, nervous systems, more.
Leadership in Healthcare opens up the world of leadership studies to all healthcare professionals. Physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals spend thousands of hours studying the science and technology of healthcare, and years or even decades putting into practice recent findings in molecular biology, clinical diagnostics, and therapeutics. By contrast, the topic of leadership and the traits of effective leaders tend to receive remarkably little attention. Yet no less vital than an understanding of how to interpret diagnostic tests and design care plans is a grasp of healthcare's organizational side, including the operation of multidisciplinary care teams, academic departments, and hospitals. If patient care, education, research, and professional service are to thrive in years to come, we must do a better job of preparing healthcare professionals to lead effectively. Composed of insightful and thought-provoking essays on the key facets of leadership, this book is designed to meet the needs of several important constituencies, including educators of health professionals who wish to incorporate leadership into their educational programs; health professional organizations seeking to enhance their members' leadership effectiveness, and individual health professionals who wish to embrace leadership in their personal and professional lives. This book represents a vital resource for health professionals who wish to enhance the quality of leadership in health professions education, practice, and professional development. In addition to regularly caring for patients, Richard Gunderman, MD PhD MPH brings to this discussion a wealth of personal experience in professional and organizational leadership.
Because of their spectacular, naturalistic pictures of plants and the human body, Leonhart Fuchs’s De historia stirpium and Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica are landmark publications in the history of the printed book. But as Picturing the Book of Nature makes clear, they do more than bear witness to the development of book publishing during the Renaissance and to the prominence attained by the fields of medical botany and anatomy in European medicine. Sachiko Kusukawa examines these texts, as well as Conrad Gessner’s unpublished Historia plantarum, and demonstrates how their illustrations were integral to the emergence of a new type of argument during this period—a visual argument for the scientific study of nature. To set the stage, Kusukawa begins with a survey of the technical, financial, artistic, and political conditions that governed the production of printed books during the Renaissance. It was during the first half of the sixteenth century that learned authors began using images in their research and writing, but because the technology was so new, there was a great deal of variety of thought—and often disagreement—about exactly what images could do: how they should be used, what degree of authority should be attributed to them, which graphic elements were bearers of that authority, and what sorts of truths images could and did encode. Kusukawa investigates the works of Fuchs, Gessner, and Vesalius in light of these debates, scrutinizing the scientists’ treatment of illustrations and tracing their motivation for including them in their works. What results is a fascinating and original study of the visual dimension of scientific knowledge in the sixteenth century.
