Podcasts about vesalius

Deze aflevering werd live met publiek opgenomen, op 10 maart 2025 in het Muntpunt in Brussel. Kelia knoopte het gesprek aan met gasten Tinne Claes en Hanane El Kaddouri. Waar komen de gender- en raciale bias vandaan? En wat kunnen we eraan doen? Hoe effenen we het pad naar een inclusieve gezondheidszorg? Beluister hun boeiende gesprek. Lady Blaxx bracht een live akoestische versie van 'Rebellenhart', het lied van de podcast.Over Tinne Claes Tinne Claes is als historica verbonden aan KU Leuven. Ze onderzoekt en publiceert over de recente geschiedenis van geneeskunde, gender en seksualiteit. Daarnaast is ze curator van het (toekomstige) museum Vesalius, dat zal onderzoeken hoe wetenschap en zorg vervlochten zijn met elkaar en met de samenleving.   Over Hanane El Kaddouri Hanane El Kaddouri is huisarts-in-opleiding in een wijkgezondheidscentrum in Gent. Ze is bestuurslid van Afromedica, een organisatie die zich inzet voor etnische diversiteit in de gezondheidszorg en de zorgopleidingen. Als huisarts, maar ook als vrouw, moslima en persoon met Marokkaanse roots, tracht zij haar steentje bij te dragen aan de uitbouw van een gezondheidszorgsysteem waarin diversiteitssensitiviteit en inclusie vanzelfsprekend zijn. Over Kelia Kaniki Masengo  Kelia Kaniki Masengo schrijft, spreekt en stuitert door het leven. Haar deelname aan de eerste editie van Nieuw Geluid, een talentontwikkelingstraject voor spraakmakende stemmen van deBuren, gaf Kelia het zetje dat ze nodig had. Sindsdien legt ze zich toe op hosten en presenteren, het schrijven van fictieteksten voor jonge kinderen en grapjes maken. In 2024 werd Kelia geselecteerd voor Get Up Stand Up, een traject voor beginnende comedians van 'Nuff Said. Kelia waardeert online stalkers, volg haar  dus snel op Instagram of surf naar haar website.  Deze opname werd georganiseerd met de steun van de Stad Brussel. Rebelle Openhartig is een podcast van Rebelle vzw. Rebelle Openhartig won op de Belgian Podcast Awards 2024 de prijs van 'Best Non-Profit Production' en de tweede prijs in de categorie 'Wellbeing'.De shownotes vind je via deze link: www.rebelle-vzw.be/Shownotes-rebelle-openhartig-live 

Warum ein flämischer Arzt Leichenteile schmuggelte, erzählt Andrea Sawatzki in dieser Folge.

This lecture, like the very essence of Ralston College's mission, explores the profound interplay between division and union—a relationship that illuminates the nature of wholeness itself.  Dr Iain McGilchrist delves into the insight that the whole is far more than the sum of its parts; it is a dynamic synthesis, a living interplay that transcends reductionism. Drawing on analogies from music, nature, and the human brain, McGilchrist reveals the delicate harmony between separation and connection, a truth exemplified most vividly in the brain's two hemispheres. Here, division and union are not adversaries but partners, each essential to the vitality of the other, enabling the brain to function as a unified and life-giving organ of thought and perception. Such a model reflects the very spirit of Ralston College's aim to unify what modernity has fractured—the intellectual and the spiritual, the individual and the communal, the ancient and the urgent. The lecture also engages with the concept of emergence, a phenomenon where systems reveal qualities and capacities far beyond what their components alone could predict. Ultimately, McGilchrist's argument aligns with the vision of this College: that division and union are not contradictory but complementary forces, driving the renewal of meaning and vitality. It is through this synthesis, through holding the tension between opposites, that true wholeness and innovation emerge—a principle as foundational to the functioning of the human brain as it is to the regeneration of our civilization. Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode: Pythagoras: 00:09:02:20 Heraclitus: 00:21:34:04 Goethe: 00:23:14:21 Whitehead: 00:24:36:18 Robert Rosen: 00:27:08:02 Rowan Williams: 00:28:44:05 Vesalius: 00:29:37:01 Camillo Golgi: 00:35:14:22 Santiago Ramon y Cajal: 00:35:47:05

The Talmud teaches us that neither man nor beast can survive without a liver. In his lamentations, Jeremiah laments, "My eyes are tired of weeping, my intestines are burning, my liver has been spilled over the earth." In Greek mythology, the liver was considered to be the seat of life for both gods and humans. It is said that Prometheus, who was punished by Zeus for giving mankind the Olympic fire, had his liver eaten daily by an eagle. However, it is also said that his liver grew back every night. It would seem that the Greeks did not fully comprehend the regenerative properties of the liver, yet they were able to encapsulate its essence symbolically. Similarly, it is thought that Etruscan oracles could 'read' the future in a sheep's liver. In art, the suffering of Christ is often depicted with a wound on the right side, which is where the liver is located. This symbolism is thought to represent the duality of salvation, associated with the qualities of good and evil. "Indeed, it would appear that the right side was chosen in order to fulfil the prophecy of the Old Testament." All of this is documented in the book "Prometheus and the Liver through Art and Medicine", a fascinating multidisciplinary publication co-authored by Thomas M. van Gulik, a highly esteemed hepatobiliary surgeon and researcher globally, who is currently Professor Emeritus of Surgery at the Amsterdam University Medical Center in the Netherlands. We are honored to have him as our guest for this remarkable episode. You are warmly invited to join us for an enlightening session with Professor van Gulik. We will have the privilege of learning from him about liver resection and regeneration, as well as exploring other wonders of the human liver and the latest advances produced by science. From ancient times, the myth of Prometheus has held a special place in the collective imagination. From the humours of Hippocrates to Vesalius, the story has continued to resonate, inspiring scientists and artists alike. As Professor van Gulik notes, the tale reminds us of the regenerative power of the liver and the enduring significance of Prometheus' fate in motivating us to advance, create and serve humanity.

 Realdo Colombo, a former student and colleague of Vesalius, challenged aspects of Galenic anatomy and made significant strides in understanding blood circulation. Through vivisection, Colombo discovered that blood circulates through the lungs, a finding that corrected earlier theories and contributed to a major shift in Renaissance anatomical and physiological studies. His work, though not initially credited, played a crucial role in advancing medical knowledge and laid the groundwork for future discoveries in human physiology. Contact: thecompletehistoryofscience@gmail.comTwitter: @complete_sciMusic Credit: Folk Round Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

Send us a Text Message.Contact: thecompletehistoryofscience@gmail.comTwitter: @complete_sciMusic Credit: Folk Round Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

IN THIS EPISODE: In this podcast episode, host Philip Guarino speaks with Andrew Lo, a distinguished professor at MIT and an entrepreneur with a focus on healthcare and deep tech ventures. Andrew shares his journey from academia to entrepreneurship, detailing his transition from economics to founding a quantitative investment firm and later exploring the financial challenges of drug development. He discusses the fundraising challenges for deep tech entrepreneurs, how investors' risk calculation differs for more complex ventures and how this requires continuous investor communication and learning. Lo also highlights the vibrant innovation ecosystem in the Boston-Cambridge area and his passion for mentoring students in entrepreneurial projects. GUEST BIO: Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of MIT's Laboratory for Financial Engineering, and principal investigator at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a co-founder and director of BridgeBio Pharma, a director of AbCellera, Atomwise, and Vesalius, a co-founder and chairman of QLS Advisors, and a member of the advisory board to the American Cancer Society's BrightEdge Impact Fund. Dr. Lo received his B.A. in economics from Yale University and his A.M. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Andreas Vesalius was een van de eersten die per se een menselijk lichaam wilde opensnijden. Vóór Vesalius dissecteerden anatomen dieren om meer te weten te komen over het menselijk lichaam. Toen Vesalius het met mensen wilde doen, wist hij niet goed waar hij aan lijken kon geraken, dus stal hij de lichamen van misdadigers aan de galg. Hoe het verder ging en hoe wetenschapppers ons daarna hebben kunnen overtuigen om ons lichaam vrijwillig af te staan aan de wetenschap, dat vertelt prof. dr. Tinne Claes, historica aan de KU Leuven. Gastspreker: Tinne Claes Redactie: Helene Vanlathem Eindredactie: Katleen Bracke Montage: Max De prins Geluid: Wederik De Backer Deze podcast is mogelijk dankzij de medewerking van KU Leuven, Antwerpen, UGent, UHasselt, VUB en de Jonge Academie en komt tot stand met de steun van Knack, VRT en de Vlaamse overheid.

Andreas Vesalius The Reformer Of Anatomy by James Moores Ball audiobook. Vesalius (born in Brussels, 1514-1564) is one of the foundation stones of modern medicine. Forsaking the study of anatomy by reading the ancients, he instead dissected bodies and drew detailed illustrations of his observations. He was enormously influential in the development of modern medicine. This 1910 biography opens up his life admirably. The printed book contains many illustrations taken from his works. The listener will want to be aware that modern historians of medicine are much more positive about the contributions of medieval Arabic medical teachers than the author of this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We discuss Vesalius, the 16th century anatomist, using excerpts from Sherwin B Nuland's book "Doctors: The Biography of Medicine". Disclaimer: All opinions are our own and don't represent any institution we may or may not be a part of, respectively.

En este capítulo conversaremos en torno a la figura del genio florentino Leonardo da Vinci, a partir de la lectura del trabajo del también italiano, el geólogo Gian Batista Vai, titulado: "Leonardo da Vinci and Nicolaus Steno's geology", publicado en el volumen 40, número 2 de la revista "Earth science history" el año 2021. En el artículo, Gian Battista nos muestra un Leonardo consciente de varias características del paisaje de la toscana, las cuales plasmó en sus famosos cuadros y describió en sus fascinantes cuadernos de notas, sobre todo en el llamado "códice de Leicester”. Estas observaciones, que hoy catalogamos indudablemente como geológicas, dan a entender, según el autor, principios estratigráficos y conceptos sedimentológicos más de un siglo antes que los trabajos de Aldrovandi y del conocido Nicolas Seteno. En el tiempo de Leonardo, los europeos occidentales comenzaron a ver la naturaleza de una manera profundamente nueva. Es el tiempo en que se desata la llamada Revolución científica, la cual ha sido explicada como el resultado del redescubrimiento de la geometría, conocimiento que transformó la contabilidad y el flujo de riqueza, la propiedad de la tierra y la organización de los estados nacionales, la navegación, la cartografía, la guerra y la forma de comprender el paisaje. Una idea moderna de paisaje fue necesaria para concebir la geología, la ciencia del paisaje, y la primera representación moderna la encontramos en un dibujo de Leonardo da Vinci. Un paisaje continuo, de apariencia tridimensional y con sus elementos dispuestos de forma ordenada que nos permitirán dimensionarlo, estudiarlo y finalmente comprenderlo. SI agregamos a lo anterior la faceta de anatomista de Leonardo, probablemente era inevitable que una mente superlativa como la de él terminara descifrando múltiples secretos geológicos en los afloramientos de la Toscana. La disección de un cuerpo con la finalidad de descubrir sus partes internas para entender cómo éstas se relacionan espacialmente, es similar a la tarea de un geólogo de campo frente a un afloramiento de rocas. De la misma manera, los dibujos de Vesalius, padre de la anatomía moderna, mostrando cadáveres desprovistos de su piel, son similares a los dibujos de Leonardo mostrando la roca desnuda con refinados detalles en los estratos. Parece no ser casual que el anatomista preeminente de la Europa del siglo XVII, Nicholas Steno, se convirtiera en el fundador de la geología con su estudio en las mismas colinas que dibujó y estudió Leonardo da Vinci, el hombre universal del Renacimiento y precursor de la geología. REFERENCIA: Vai G., 2021. Leonardo da Vinci's and Nicolaus Steno's Geology. Earth Sciences History, 293-331, 40(2) Rosenberg G., 2010. The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (GSA Memoir 203)-Geological Society of Amer

This is a special quick episode of the Medical Illustration podcast to announce the 2022 Vesalius Trust-a-thon team art challenge event! Joining me on this episode is Chelsea Canlas, Vice President of the Vesalius Trust. You can learn more about the Vesalius Trust and upcoming Trust-a-thon at: https://vesaliustrust.org/upcoming-events/trustathon-2022/

Als HR professional weet jij natuurlijk dat het onwaarschijnlijk belangrijk is om medewerkers geïnformeerd, geconnecteerd en betrokken te houden. Maar dat blijkt allesbehalve een evidentie.In deze reeks van podcasts kruip ik daarom - samen met Tom Segers, chief customer officer van Spencer - in het hoofd van een aantal communicatieprofessionals. En samen met Tom ga ik op zoek naar hefbomen voor frictieloze interne communicatie. Hoe zorg je ervoor dat iedereen mee is en werken communicatieprofessionals vandaag al graag en goed samen met HR professionals?In deze episode gaan we tips en inspiratie tanken bij het algemeen ziekenhuis Vesalius midden in het glooiende Haspengouw, 326 bedden, 130 artsen en 800 personeelsleden verspreid over twee campussen, één in Tongeren en één in Bilzen. Bij Sarina Simenon, communicatieverantwoordelijke bij AZ Vesalius en Ann-Catherine Verjans , communicatiemedewerker & data protection officer.  En 5 concrete tips van interne communicatie professionals voor HR professonials:(1) Vermijd vakjargon! Gebruik duidelijke taal(2) Vermijd vage doelstellingen. Wees concreet in wat je verwacht én in wat je biedt(3) Vermeld niet enkel the 'need to knows' maar ook 'the nice to knows'(4) Zet je eigen medewerkers (meer) in(5) Geef een blik achter de schermen en maak de communicatie op die manier relevant én luchtigVeel kijk- en luisterplezier+++Honger naar meer? SCHRIJF JE IN VOOR DE NIEUWSBRIEF - https://zigzaghr.be/inschrijving-nieuwsbriefLEES DE ARTIKELS - https://zigzaghr.be/inspiratie/ABONNEER JE OP HET TIJDSCHRIFT - https://zigzaghr.be/tijdschrift/And don't forget: it's a great time to be in HR!+++Opgenomen in November Five - Antwerpen

Nyhetssändning från kulturredaktionen P1, med reportage, nyheter och recensioner. Hundratals böcker om krig skrivna i Ukraina sedan 2014, Putintrogne dirigenten Gergiev stoppas från scener i väst, recension av Kenneth Branaghs film Belfast samt Magnus Dahlströms bok Vesalius

In s2e12, Ann Shafer and Tru Ludwig discuss the titan of Venetian painting, Titian, who happened to also make prints. Plus Ann and Tru take a deep dive into the epic first book of anatomy, Vesalius' On the Fabric of the Human Body, 1543. It turns out Titian had a hand in some of the woodcut illustrations in it.

In today's episode I spoke again to Dr Patrick CN Martin from the Biotech research and innovation centre at the University of Copenhagen, about spatial transcriptomics. Patrick is a post doctoral researcher who has been working on ST and more specifically, this pre print which we also took a deep dive into, on todays episode! Patricks new tool, named Vesalius (stay tuned to find out why) is able to decipher tissue anatomy from ST data by converting transcriptomic information into a color code for image segmentation. The tool is able to successfully detect tissue architecture in mouse embryo and brain from high resolution ST data by incorporating image processing algorithms. Vesalius is a tool to perform high-resolution in silico anatomization and molecular characterization from ST data. If like me, you feel unclear on what exactly is ST and how it works, stay tuned to learn lots! Even if you do know what ST is, don't worry! once Patrick taught me all about ST, we took a deep dive into the pre print, and discussed so many interesting topics. Patricks twitter: https://twitter.com/pcnmartin The pre print: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.13.456235v2 GREECS registration : https://whova.com/portal/registration/early_202201/

PART 1: In this episode, Kali and Kaitlin talk about the history of medical illustration! Tune in to hear about old practices, treatises, and important people and laugh about all of the odd and interesting revelations that made it what we know and love today. Things to chat about: Cave Paintings, Code of Hammurabi, Imhotep, Ancient Egypt, Graverobbers, Galen as Kaitlin's dinner date, Herophilius, Vesalius

Andreas Vesalius, o maior dos anatomistas da Renascença, um dos primeiros a praticar a dissecação do corpo humano, cujas observações permitiram corrigir as noções errôneas de Galeno, considerado o "pai da anatomia moderna" e autor do atlas de anatomia "De Humani Corporis Fabrica", morre em Zakinthos, na Grécia, em 15 de outubro de 1564.Veja a matéria completa em: https://operamundi.uol.com.br/historia/24864/hoje-na-historia-1564-morre-vesalius-pai-da-anatomia-moderna----Quer contribuir com Opera Mundi via PIX? Nossa chave é apoie@operamundi.com.br (Razão Social: Última Instancia Editorial Ltda.). Desde já agradecemos!Assinatura solidária: www.operamundi.com.br/apoio★ Support this podcast ★

The Asian expulsion from Uganda with Idi Amin's rise to power in 1972 is the focus of London based author Hafsa Zayyan's debut novel We Are All Birds of Uganda which deals with many themes the author has lived with all her life. Also, John Byron's crime fiction debut, The Tribute, inspired by the Fabrica, a famous medieval anatomy text, and The Airways, a queer ghost story by Jennifer Mills.

The Asian expulsion from Uganda with Idi Amin's rise to power in 1972 is the focus of London based author Hafsa Zayyan's debut novel We Are All Birds of Uganda which deals with many themes the author has lived with all her life. Also, John Byron's crime fiction debut, The Tribute, inspired by the Fabrica, a famous medieval anatomy text, and The Airways, a queer ghost story by Jennifer Mills.

Andreas Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica (1543) is a landmark publication in the history of medicine, well known for its illustrations. Yet, the actual function of these illustrations within Vesalius own project of classical anatomy has not always been appreciated. In this talk, Dr Kusukawa examines the different - and often ingenious - ways in which Vesalius used anatomical images in his book. Speaker: Dr Sachiko Kusukawa (University of Cambridge)

Andreas Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica (1543) is a landmark publication in the history of medicine, well known for its illustrations. Yet, the actual function of these illustrations within Vesalius own project of classical anatomy has not always been appreciated. In this talk, Dr Kusukawa examines the different - and often ingenious - ways in which Vesalius used anatomical images in his book. Speaker: Dr Sachiko Kusukawa (University of Cambridge)

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Selected for our 10th episode anniversary by our listeners, The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a 1971 British comedy horror film, produced by Ronald S. Dunas and Louis M. Heyward, directed by Robert Fuest.It stars, in his first appearance on the podcast, mister Vincent Price. Its art deco sets, dark humour, and performance by Price have made the film and its sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again cult classics. The film also features Terry-Thomas and Hugh Griffith, with an uncredited Caroline Munro appearing in still photographs as Phibes' wife.We follow the title character, Dr. Anton Phibes, who blames the medical team that attended to his wife's surgery four years prior for her death and sets out to exact vengeance on each one.Phibes is inspired in his murderous spree by the Ten Plagues of Egypt from the Old Testament. For visual reasons, the plagues of flies and gnats were replaced with rats and bats.The film was shot on the "20s era" sets at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire. The cemetery scenes were shot in Highgate Cemetery, As well as the aforementioned sequel, several others were planned, including Phibes Resurrectus, The Bride of Dr. Phibes, and The Seven Fates of Dr. Phibes, but none were ever produced. In order to gain more publicity, this film was advertised as Vincent Price's 100th movie.Linking this back to past General Witchfinder featured films (which inexplicably seem to all have been made with in a few years of each other) - Of course Caroline Munro has been seen writhing around in a blood sacrifice to Dracula in AD 1972. Peter Cushing was originally cast as Vesalius, but he declined because his wife was in poor health at the time, and a young Joanna Lumley did appeared as a laboratory assistant, but her scenes were sadly cut.$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$Just in case anyone has too much money and wants to give a bit to us to help with our hosting n stuff. It would be amazing if you fancied sending us some pennies - thank you.https://supporter.acast.com/general-witchfinders$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$ Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/general-witchfinders. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In 1543, Andreas Vesalius dissected a corpse, thereby inaugurating a scientific attitude toward the human body. This new attitude taught us to stand aside from our identification and connection with the body and see it as a lifeless subject of inquiry. Such an approach brought obvious vital advances in science and medicine, but it also came at a cost. In the 20th century, philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida did for language what Vesalius had done for the human body. Their careful dissection of language laid bare formerly hidden assumptions and revealed the ways that language shapes our thinking.  We are joined on the podcast by Dr. Bret Alderman, author of Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language: A Jungian Interpretation of the Linguistic Turn. We discuss alienation and dissociation that results from the Promethean project to deconstruct language and its meaning.  Foucault, Derrida, and the other postmodernists contributed valuable insights to our understanding of the role of language in determining our assumptions. Still, their desire to sever the meaning of words from those things that words represent is symptomatic of a profound dissociation from our embodied, instinctual selves. Jung was aware of the perils inherent in such a project. "This rupture of the link with the unconscious and our submission to the tyranny of words has one great disadvantage: the conscious mind becomes more and more the victim of its discriminating activity, the picture of the world gets broken down into countless particulars, and the original feelings of unity, which we integrally connected with the unity of the unconscious psyche, is lost. This feeling of unity, in the form of correspondence theory and the sympathy of all things, dominated philosophy until well into the seventeenth century." The ideas of the postmodernists have permeated culture in ways that are not always obvious. Current movements to redefine certain phenomena as social constructs are evidence of the inroads these philosophies have made. Though there are benefits to looking at this world this way, these ideas may also be giving rise to a "rootless consciousness." Here's the dream we analyze: "There are tarantulas stuck on my skin the way ticks would be. They are big and hairy. Strangely the tarantulas are hidden in small boxes, which hang on my body. So their legs are digging into my skin, but I can't see them unless I remove the boxes. My mother is helping me to remove the spiders, but they keep coming back. They don't crawl upon me but rather seem to be born from my skin. All of a sudden, my mother is gone, and I'm alone with some spiders still hanging on me. I can't remove them myself because I'm too scared to touch them. I am terrified and helpless." REFERENCES: Dr. Bret Alderman. Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language: A Jungian Interpretation of the Linguistic Turn. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0815359136/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_9HK34JAF7WEVYR1JQS5V Cave of Forgotten Dreams. (Movie). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbqBNKZ-aU RESOURCES: Learn to Analyze your own Dreams:  https://thisjungianlife.com/enroll/ You can contact Dr. Bret Alderman at https://www.aldermancoaching.com/

Episode Source Material:Anthropodermic Books: The Anthropodermic Book Project – A research project to identify the world's books bound in human skinDark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human SkinThe macabre world of books bound in human skinAnthropodermic Bibliopegy – A Flay on Words – Odd Things ConsideredTanneries of human skin? MeudonAnthropodermic Bibliopegy: Books Bound in Human Skin'Dark Archives' Explores The Use Of Human Skin In BookbindingSeeking the Truth Behind Books Bound in Human SkinThe Hide That Binds | by Mike JayBooks Bound in Human Skin Aren't Fiction and a UCLA Librarian Has the StoryBooks Bound in Human Skin – The Practice Isn't As Rare As You Might Think!A Book by Its Cover | Lapham's QuarterlyScience Confirms: Yup, This Book Really Is Bound in Human SkinThe Skin She Lived In: Anthropodermic Books in the Historical Medical LibraryIn a literal bindHay Library's Special Collections offer more than a human skin-bound bookAnthropodermic bibliopegyHans Holbein:Hans Holbein's Dance of Death (1523–5) – The Public Domain ReviewHans Holbein: Dance of DeathDanse MacabreAndreas Vesalius:From the library's historical treasures < Yale School of MedicineL'Histoire de la reliure de Josse SchavyeThe self-publicist whose medical text books caused a stirPublic Dissection Was a Gruesome Spectacle(PDF) Stolen and lost copies of Vesalius's FabricaM. Adolphe Belot:Mademoiselle Giraud, my wifeMademoiselle Giraud, Ma femme, and: Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife (review)In the Flesh? Anthropodermic Bibliopegy Verification and Its Implications  Burke and Hare:The Worlds of Burke and HareJames AllenNarrative of the life of James Allen : alias George Walton, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the highwayman : being his death-bed confession, to the warden of the Massachusetts State Prison. - Rare Books -History of AnatomyThe study of anatomy in England from 1700 to the early 20th centuryHistory of anatomyHistory of medicine in FranceHuman cadaveric dissection: a historical account from ancient Greece to the modern eraMurder Act 1751

Changes in the Renaissance and Andreas Vesalius

Hey, I'm building off the last episode and talking about anatomy in the Renaissance. Find me on Instagram and Facebook @ramblingswithamedicalhistorian on Twitter @ramblings_mh. Email me at ramblings.mh@gmail.com. Here is a list of sources; “Andreas Vesalius in De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543)” reproduced in Robert E. Greenspan, Medicine: Perspectives in History and Art. Alexandria, VA: Ponteverde Press, 2006. “Skeletal and muscular system in De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543)” reproduced in Robert E. Greenspan, Medicine: Perspectives in History and Art. Alexandria, VA: Ponteverde Press, 2006. “William Harvey, The circulation and venous valves in Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis (1628)” reproduced in Robert E. Greenspan, Medicine: Perspectives in History and Art. Alexandria, VA: Ponteverde Press, 2006. Da Vinci, Leonardo. “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, (1452-1519)” in Logan Clendening, Source Book of Medical History. Translated by Edward MacCurdy, 1938. New York: Dover Publications, 1960. Harvey, William. “Anatomical Exercises on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (1628-1657)” in Logan Clendening, Source Book of Medical History trans Robert Willis, 1847. New York: Dover Publications, 1960. Van Rijn, Rembrandt. “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp (1632)” reproduced in Robert E. Greenspan, Medicine: Perspectives in History and Art. Alexandria, VA: Ponteverde Press, 2006. Vesalius, Andreas. “The Fabric of the Human Body (1543)” in Logan Clendening, Source Book of Medical History. Translated by W.P. Hotchkiss. New York: Dover Publications, 1960. “William Harvey and Modern Cardiology” The British Medical Journal, 1, no.6116 (1978): 803-804. (Accessed January 22, 2016). http://www.jstor.org/stable/20418411 Ambrose, Charles T. “Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) – An Unfinished Life” Acta Medico-Historica Adriatica, 12, no.2 (2014): 216-230. (Accessed March 5, 2016). Bardell, David. “William Harvey, 1578-1657, Discoverer of the Circulation of Blood: In Commemoration of the 400th Anniversary of His Birth” BioScience, 28, no.4 (1978): 257-259. (Accessed January 26, 2016). http://www.jstor.org/stable/1307276 Clendening, Logan. Source Book of Medical History. New York: Dover Publications, 1960. Hæger, Knut. The Illustrated History of Surgery. Edited and translated by Jon van Leuven. Gothenburg, Sweden: AB Nordbok, 2000. Kemp, Martin. “Dissection and Divinity in Leonardo's Late Anatomies.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972): 200-225. (Accessed October 5, 2015) http://www.jstor.org/stable/750929 Laurenza, Domenico. “Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy: Images From a Scientific Revolution.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 69, no.3 (2012): 4-48. (Accessed January 26, 2016) http://www.jstor.org/stable/23222879 Loudon, Irvine, ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of Western Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ramblings-mh/message

Connections between philosophy and advances in medicine, including the anatomy of Vesalius.

Episode 1 features Marc Lohrmann, Managing Partner of Vesalius Biocapital III, a 120 €M venture capital fund investing in late-stage companies in drug development, medical devices & diagnostics and eHealth / mHealth, across all of Europe. Prior to joining the fund, Marc started eight life sciences companies, worked as an investment manager at one of Europe's leading corporate VCs and worked with several corporate finance boutiques focused on life sciences M&A transactions.**In this episode, you'll learn**– How VBC III works as a country-agnostic VC fund and what Marc believes are the main barriers to more funds investing across Europe.– How investors without a natural sciences background can create value in Life Sciences companies and why technical founders often find this type of investor a refreshing element in the board room.– What Marc would love to change about the European VC scene, what's important to remember when investing across European borders and what's next for Marc and Vesalius.

The De humani corporis fabrica of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) is the most famous of all books on anatomy. Its artistic brilliance and its insistence on human, not animal, dissection as the basis for understanding the body has ensured that the work has an honoured place in all major libraries. Less attention has been paid to the revised 1555 edition, while the recent discovery of his annotations for a further unpublished edition, as well as the existence of further revisions to his revision of Gunther von Andernach’s Institutiones anatomicae, have thrown new light on the man and on his relationship with his Basle publisher, Oporinus. This talk discusses Vesalius’ activities as reviser and corrector over his career as a Galenic anatomist. Speaker: Prof Vivian Nutton (University College London)

The De humani corporis fabrica of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) is the most famous of all books on anatomy. Its artistic brilliance and its insistence on human, not animal, dissection as the basis for understanding the body has ensured that the work has an honoured place in all major libraries. Less attention has been paid to the revised 1555 edition, while the recent discovery of his annotations for a further unpublished edition, as well as the existence of further revisions to his revision of Gunther von Andernach's Institutiones anatomicae, have thrown new light on the man and on his relationship with his Basle publisher, Oporinus. This talk discusses Vesalius' activities as reviser and corrector over his career as a Galenic anatomist. Speaker: Prof Vivian Nutton (University College London)

This is a repost from 2018, an article caled Wired Into Pain: a history of the science of pain. I hope you enjoy it. I’ve also recorded an audio version to go with it!I am a Physiotherapist. Almost every person I see in clinic is in pain, and most already have an idea about what has caused their pain. If they are old enough, they might say ‘overuse’, or ‘wear and tear’; if they are younger, they might say ‘bad posture’ or ‘tight muscles’; if they have had a scan, they might say a ‘slipped disc’ or a ‘bone spur’. We accept these explanations prima facie. We consider pain to be a readout on the state of the body’s tissues. Or, as one doctor wrote in 1917, it is “the unerring medical compass that serves as a guide to the pathological lesion”.But it is only very recently that we have come to understand our aches and pains in this way. Since medieval times, until surprisingly recently, people commonly understood their pains in terms of their relationship to God, often as punishment for sin. Physical and emotional pain were entangled, along with mind, body and soul. This was the grim logic of medieval torture and self-flagellation: the truth of the soul could be accessed through the pain of the body.But, as historian Joanna Bourke records in her book The Story of Pain, this mixture of mind, body, soul and God also allowed people to feel pain as comforting: a “vigilant sentinel […] stationed in the frail body by Providence”, as one writer put it in 1832. For others, pain was redemptive: take, for example, the early nineteenth-century labourer Joseph Townend, who resolved himself to God after undergoing surgery without anaesthetic, and reflected at the end of his life on his “sincere thanks to the Almighty God” for his agonising conversion.Pre-modern physicians had a different perspective. Most understood pain according to humoural theory. Hippocrates and his disciple Galen considered all illness to be caused by an imbalance of the body’s humours — phlegm, yellow bile, black bile and blood — which ebb and flow in response changes in the body or its environment. This notion endured for many centuries. To one 18th century writer, pain was a consequence of “viscid blood [stopping] at every narrow passage in its progress”; to another, it was a “Nature throw[ing] a Mischief” about his body. Humoural theory is pre-scientific and seems quaint to us now. But, as Bourke points out, it accounts for an abundance of influences, from our personal temperament and our relationships to the alignment of the planets above our heads, on the pain that we feel.Over the coming centuries, at great cost to people suffering from pain, this insight was lost. This is the story of that loss; of how we arrived at the strange, wrong idea that pain is a straightforward “guide to the pathological lesion”; and of how an emerging re-understanding of pain shows us that it is more complex and more astonishing than we have thought for centuries.Descartes, dualism and the labelled line“The ghost in the machine” — Gilbert RyleIt is in the sixteenth century that we find the beginnings of the dominant modern understanding of the body and its pains. The rise of Protestantism and, amongst secular thinkers, of humanism, contributed to an increased focus on the individual and an understanding of the body as a natural, rather than a supernatural entity. Medicine became more interested in anatomy and the physical laws of nature. Vesalius published his On the Fabric of the Human Body, a compendium of illustrations of dissected cadavers based on the author’s strict, first-hand observations at a time when doctors were not accustomed to performing their own dissections. Later, physicians like William Harvey took principles from physics and astronomy to show that in many ways, our bodies can be understood as machines: pumps, pulleys and levers. Slowly, the body became less sacred and more scientific.It was in this spirit that, in 1641, the French polymath Renes Descartes published his Meditations on First Philosophy. This work contains a drawing that became the seminal image of pain for the next three hundred years. The picture shows a kneeling boy with one foot perilously close to a small campfire. The heat of the flame sends a signal (an “animal spirit”) up a channel to the boy’s pituitary gland, which Descartes reckoned was the seat of consciousness. There, the signal elicits pain, “just as pulling one end of a cord rings the bell at the other end”.This picture makes sense to us, it seems intuitively correct. But this is because in matters of pain we are most of us now, in the Western world at least, the children of Descartes. For pain scientists on the other hand, who have fought in recent decades to emancipate themselves from Descartes, this picture has has come to represent the original sin, the first big lie of the Western world’s understanding of pain.It’s crimes are twofold. First, it is the essence of an idea called dualism, which holds that mind and body are separate. The body feels pain, and passes this information on to the mind. For Cartesian dualists, the body is a machine and we are a kind of ghost in the machine, receiving information about its status.Second, the picture represents pain as being felt by a specific detector in the body, and passed up a specific pathway, the long hollow tube, to a specific location in the boy’s brain. Pain detectors, at the end of a pain pathway, that leads to a pain centre. This idea is called specificity theory, but in this post I’m going to use the term labelled line theory because although it is less common, I think it is more descriptive — a labelled line for pain.As it happens, Descartes’ idea was more subtle than the picture and its subsequent interpretations made out. In his defence, the historians Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Karl A.E. Enenkel point out that Descartes knew that pain is not merely perceived, like a mariner perceives his ship, but felt, as if the mind and body are “nighly conjoin’d […] so that I and it make up one thing”. Descartes knew that we don’t just have a body; we are a body. But this subtlety was lost: the picture of the little boy with his foot in the fire has a memetic power that has carried it, along with dualism and the labelled line, through the centuries.The nineteenth century“Nothing less than the social transformation of Western medicine” — Daniel GoldbergThis change came gradually. It was not until the nineteenth century, two hundred years after Descartes’ Meditations, that dualism and the labelled line for pain finally established their authority in medicine.They set in as part of a wider change in the history of medicine following the French Revolution that is sometimes now called the ‘Paris School’. The physicians of the Paris School transformed large teaching hospitals in the city to dedicate them, for the first time, to furthering scientific knowledge through rigorous observation of patients and cadavers, and the classification of disease. They explicitly rejected humoural theory, which held that illnesses are processes that are distributed around the body through the movement of viscous humours. Rather, physicians of the Paris School considered diseases to be the result of lesions localised to a single, solid organ.Influenced by the Paris School, Victorian physicians across the Western world began to search their suffering patients’ bodies for a local, solid lesion to blame for their pain. As one New York physician wrote in 1880, “we fully agree that there can be no morbid manifestations without a change in the material structure of the organs involved”. For the first time, doctors began to think like detectives on the hunt for the smoking gun, following clues provided by the body and its sensations (it is no coincidence that Arthur Conan Doyle was a doctor before he wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories, or that he made his character Watson one, too).This approach has tremendous diagnostic power. But, as we will see, even modern researchers find that our pain, particularly our chronic pain, resists reduction by detective work. How did Victorian physicians respond when their investigations failed to turn up a local lesion to explain pain? According to historian and medical ethicist Daniel Goldberg, many doubled down, hunting for anything they could find. As one surgeon put it, “any lesion anywhere in the body will do to account for an otherwise inexplicable pain”. And that meant any lesion: the surgeon Joseph Swann, or example, baffled by a woman’s 11-year history of pain in an apparently healthy knee, eventually attributed it to an imperfection he found, after much searching, in a nerve in her hand.Those that could not find a lesion anywhere explained unexplained pain as one inevitably must if one subscribes to the logic of dualism: if it’s not in the body, it must be in the mind. Goldberg tells the story of the surgeon Josiah Nott who, in 1872, took on the care of an American soldier whose leg was crushed in a railway accident. The leg had already been amputated by another surgeon at a point about halfway up the calf, but the soldier had developed phantom limb pains. The original surgeon, assuming there must be a local lesion at the end of a labelled line, had then amputated the stump, but to no avail. Nott, making the same assumption, took still more from the stump the next year, and still the patient felt no relief. Later that year, Dr. Nott operated again, removing tissues from three major nerves in the shank. This pattern continued until Nott had removed the poor soldier’s leg up to four inches above the knee, and his sciatic nerve up to the pelvis. When the patient’s pain returned after this final operation, Dr. Nott reasoned that he must have acquired an addiction to opioids which was inciting him to malinger (to exaggerate or feign his disease). Nott had, horribly literally, followed the assumed cause of the disease up a labelled line through the body and, not catching it, decided it must therefore be in the mind.This logic played out on a broad scale in physicians’ understanding of the now-forgotten condition “railway spine”, the widespread and mysterious back pain felt by the victims of train accidents. Initially, physicians thought that the trauma of a crash caused compression of nerve filaments that in turn caused pain. But as time wore on and their investigations repeatedly failed to find a tissue lesion to explain railway spine, even in cadavers, their suspicion grew that railway spine was not a ‘real’ condition at all. After all, weren’t most victims also seeking compensation from railway companies? By the beginning of the twentieth century, railway spine was known instead as “hysterical spine […] merely a psychical condition”. Dualism dictated once more that if we can’t find it in the body, it must be in the mind.1900 to 1965Anomalies, non-anomalies, and opening the gateAnomalies“[Pain] reveals only a minute proportion of illnesses and often, when it is one of their accompaniments, is misleading. On the other hand, in certain chronic cases it seems to be the entire disorder which, without it, would not exist.” — Rene Leriche, 1937The break from Cartesianism began at the end of the nineteenth century, when the great neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal showed that our nerves, spinal cord and brain are not one thing but composed of many smaller things (which came to be called neurons) linked by gap junctions (which came to be called synapses). Decades earlier, the English neuroscientist Charles Bell had suggested that the function of the nervous system is less straightforward than the labelled line in Descartes’s picture, and Cajal’s work was proof.As we can see by his extraordinary drawings, Cajal meticulously mapped the peripheral neurons in our arms and legs, running to the spinal cord, and the neurons running up the cord, and many of those in our brain. But, according to pain scientist and writer Fernando Cervero, the terminus for incoming peripheral neurons, the foremost part of the spinal cord that we now call the dorsal horn, was so dense and chaotic that it resisted even Cajal’s fastidious eye. He called the dorsal horn a maremagnum, a Spanish word that means ‘confused and disorganised crowd’, as in the bustle of a busy railway station. Cajal’s vision of a network of individual cells, with nodes of incomprehensible complexity, opened up the possibility that signals aren’t simply passed upwards in a linear fashion as Descartes had assumed, but are modulated along the way.The idea that inputs to the nervous system are modulated before they ‘become’ our sensations hints at an explanation for the odd persistent pains for which Victorian physicians could find no lesion. It also begins to explain the opposite phenomenon, lesions that cause no pain, which became unignorable during the brutal first decades of the twentieth century. Doctors like Rene Leriche, on the front line in the Great War, found that soldiers with dreadful wounds often felt no pain and could undergo surgery without anaesthetic. Leriche knew this was not willpower but “certain movements of the hormones, or of the blood”, a presciently non-Cartesian thought.During the Second World War, the American anaesthesiologist Henry Beecher built on Leriche’s observations by conducting a more methodical study at his post in Italy. He found that as many as three quarters of wounded soldiers felt little pain at the time of their injury. As one doctor put it, it was as if wounds and diseases “carry for the most part — most mercifully — their own anaesthetics with them”.One might think that such cases would have alerted the scientific community to the fact that our nervous systems are doing something more than passively relaying pain into our brains, as labelled line theory implied. But for scientists and doctors at large, anomalies that defied labelled line went on hiding in plain sight, “discovered” periodically and then easily forgotten as they had been in the Victorian era. Phantom limb pain, for example, was unignorable during the American Civil War, and then slipped once more from popular consciousness. The doctor and writer Oliver Sacks called these periods of forgetting scotoma, dark gaps in the scientific awareness in which the prevailing theory cannot explain common phenomena and instead shoves them in the attic to think about another day. The progress of science, wrote Sacks, is faltering and haphazard, “very far from a majestic unfolding”.Non-anomalies“Pain is the physiological adjunct of a protective reflex” — Charles Sherrington, writing in 1900“Pain remains a biological enigma — so much of it is useless, a mere curse” — Charles Sherrington, writing forty years later.(Quoted in Understanding Pain by Fernando Cervero)Rather than explaining anomalies, scientists studying pain at the beginning of the twentieth century focused on a series of discoveries that appeared, at first, to confirm labelled line theory. The British neuroscientist Charles Sherrington had coined the term “nociceptor” for the neurons that convey danger messages (elicited by things like heat, intense mechanical pressure or an incision to the skin) to the brain, and in the following decades researchers slowly but successfully identified and isolated these cells.Starting in 1912, American scientists performed the first anterolateral cordotomy, slicing through the part of the spinal cord that was theorized to carry danger messages to the brain and appearing to stop pain in its tracks. Later, the success of such operations would prove to be temporary, but the procedure did show that this part of the spinal cord houses Sherrington’s nociceptors. In 1927, the Americans Herbert Gasser and Joseph Erlanger established that different nerve fibers conduct signals at different velocities, and classified them according to their diameter as A, B and C fibers. A fibers were widest and conducted signals the quickest; C fibers were the most narrow and slow. They found that one sub-type of A fibers, A-delta fibers, conducted the relatively quick sensation of dull pain we feel when we stub our toe; and that C fibers conduct the slower, stinging pain that arrives later. Again, this neat distinction would later prove to be more complicated, but the discovery was further evidence for a labelled line of pain. Gasser and Erlanger were only able to look at conduction signals from a whole bundle of nerves and so it was not until 1958 that Ainsley Iggo was first to record individual A-delta and C fibers and isolate Sherrington’s nociceptors for the first time.Opening the gate“It may seem easy, but it was not” — Ronald MelzackDespite this series of discoveries in favour of labelled line, some researchers could not shake from their minds those confounding anomalies: pain without lesion, and lesion without pain. And so, at last, the science of pain began to wake from its scotoma. Some scientists began to propose a theory to compete with labelled line called pattern theory, which held that it is not the stimulation of specific nerves that causes the sensation of pain, but that the way in which nerves are stimulated, spatially and temporally. Pattern theory was vague, and had nowhere near the amount of evidence that supported labelled line theory, but it did hint at an answer to some of the anomalies that had been documented in the recent scientific literature, such as the way pain spreads beyond the site of an injury and the way rubbing a pain can make it temporarily feel better. Pattern theory was taken up in Oxford in the 1940s and 50s, where the brilliant British neuroscientist Pat Wall was beginning to develop ideas he would turn into gate control theory, a whole new model of pain.In 1959, Wall moved from Oxford to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he met Ronald Melzack. Melzack, a Canadian, had just arrived at M.I.T. to take up a post as assistant professor of Psychology, and found to his annoyance that he could not perform research on animals in the university’s Psychology building. So, Melzack decamped to Wall’s lab. The two quickly took up a discussion on the inadequacy of Cartesianism and decided to come up with a new theory to “entice spinal-cord physiologists away from [labelled line]”.From his previous research, Melzack knew the brain sends messages down the spinal cord to inhibit the messages coming up it, exerting a kind of ‘top-down’ control on incoming information. From his own experiments, inspired by pattern theory, Wall knew that different inputs into the nervous system are weighed against each other somehow in the spinal cord, competing to be ‘sent up’ to the brain. Despite their discussions, Melzack and Wall’s ideas remained inchoate until, in 1962, Melzack stumbled on the Dutchman Willem Noordenbos’s pattern-theory hypothesis that large A-fibers carrying touch signals might somehow inhibit small C-fibers carrying danger signals.Melzack calls this moment a “flash of insight”. Noordenbos had theorized that this modulation happened in the substantia gelatinosa, which is part of the terminus for incoming information at the spinal cord. Wall knew that large fibers and small fibers entered the substantia gelatinosa at opposite ends, and theorised that it was this setup that allowed the one to inhibit the other, like closing a figurative ‘gate’. The weight of signals from large and small fibers would determine what kind of message was allowed up to the brain.In 1963, Melzack moved to McGill University in Canada, but travelled South over the border when he could to visit Wall’s home in Boston where, over large amounts of duty free whiskey, the two put the finishing, definitive touches to their work. Their theory differed critically from Noordenbos’ because they proposed that the brain itself plays a role in processing at the substantia gelatinosa, by sending signals down the spinal cord to make the ‘gate’ more likely to open or close to danger signals. This was gate control theory.For the first time, science had a model that began to explain pain anomalies. According to gate control theory, for example, the brain of a soldier who has sustained an injury can send messages down the spinal cord to close the gate to incoming danger signals. Over fifty years have passed, and gate control theory has turned out to be wrong in lots of little ways, but right in one big way: it is modulation in the spinal cord and the brain, or the central nervous system, that explains why pain is so rarely the reliable sign of tissue status that Victorian scientists assumed it was.Neuromatrix theory“We need to go… to the brain” — Ronald Melzack“When you feel a pain in the leg that has been amputated, where is the pain? If you say it is in your head, would it be in your head if your leg had not been amputated? If you say yes, then what reason have you for ever thinking you have a leg?” — Bertrand RussellGate control theory was a great advance but Melzack and Wall knew their theory was incomplete. According to Oliver Sacks, it is by studying anomalies — phenomena not explained by the prevailing theory — that researchers wake from scotoma and begin revolutions in scientific understanding. So it was that Melzack’s interest in the anomaly of phantom limb pain led to neuromatrix theory, the next great boost that finally allowed pain science to escape to orbit of CartesianismIf people without limbs have phantom pain, Melzack reasoned, it follows that the origins of the pattern of pain lie not in the limb but in the brain. And not only pain, but the sensation of having a body in its entirety — its place in the world, its shape, its movements — is housed, in what Melzack came to understand as a series of loops and patterns of neurons, inside our brains. This brain architecture is the neuromatrix.Incoming information, then, is not what holds the essence of our sensations; it merely triggers the neuromatrix, already inscribed in the brain, to ‘produce’ the sensations we feel. If a boy puts his foot in a fire, the nerves do not tell a passive brain “here is pain”; the nerves simply say “here is an intense input”, and the neuromatrix does the rest.How do we get a neuromatrix? Melzack says it is inborn, but then shaped by experiences. So, your neuromatrix develops your own personal signatures for familiar pains, like the pain you might feel in your back when you bend. Crucially, the neuromatrix uses our thoughts and emotions to generate our sensations, as well as sensory information. This makes sense: think of a stroke on the leg from your partner and one from an unappealing stranger. The same sensory input feels different.So, if you believe the cause of your back pain is something threatening, like a suspected spinal cancer or a ‘slipped’ disc, it willfeelworse than if you believe it is something benign, like a muscle strain. If a conscripted soldier sustains a battlefield injury that means he will likely have to leave the trenches to convalesce behind the front lines, that wound may not feel as bad as it would for a factory worker, for whom it could mean a loss of livelihood. If you have just been made redundant, or become divorced, than the incoming danger signals from an incipiently arthritic hip might suddenly start triggering your neuromatrix to produce a deep aching pain in your joints.Pain is intimately integrated with meaning, and informed by the broader context of our lives. And there is no labelled line: pain is the output of a widely-distributed neural process that takes input from countless biological, psychological and social factors.The sensitive nervous system“Not under conditions of my choosing / Wired into pain / Rider on the slow train” — Adrienne RichResearchers have used the neuromatrix as a foundation to develop our understanding of pain. For example, towards the end of the 1970s, scientists began to establish that the endings of our danger messenger neurons, the ones Sherrington christened nociceptors, become more sensitive the more they are used, a process called peripheral sensitization. But perhaps the most remarkable development since Melzack proposed the neuromatrix was Clifford Woolf’s discovery of central sensitization.On completing his medical training in South Africa in the early 1980s, Clifford Woolf joined Pat Wall’s laboratory in London. He was not content with measuring the readouts from individual chains of neurons, and instead began to monitor broader bursts of activity which he thought would give him more insight into the pain system as a whole. He started to measure the output of the neurons that cause muscles to flex away from a dangerous stimulus (think of touching a hot stove and retracting your hand before you are even conscious of pain). Investigating on rats, he found that most of these cells responded to dangerous stimuli, such as heat and pinch, in a fairly narrow field — say, one toe. But, some cells had a very wide receptive field and would respond to even light, non-dangerous touch. Why would rats have neurons designed to elicit a withdrawal response to light touch?It took Woolf some months to realise that he was only finding these neurons at the end of the workday, when his rats had already been subjected to hours of pain-inducing stimuli. He calls this his “eureka moment”. He had not discovered that rats have certain neurons that are super sensitive across a wide receptive field: he had discovered that a rat’s nervous system becomes super sensitive across a wide receptive field when it has been exposed to prolonged danger. Woolf had discovered an ‘amplifier’ mechanism in the spinal cord. This phenomenon is central sensitization.Woolf was the first person to show that the nervous system is not hard-wired for pain but plastic. Prolonged nociception can change the behaviour and the architecture of the nervous system so that non-dangerous inputs (like light touch) are felt as painful, and dangerous inputs (like a pinprick) produce more pain than they otherwise would have done. To top it off, this whole pain experience also spreads beyond the original site of injury. The great physiotherapist Louis Gifford described central sensitization as like tapping X on your computer keyboard three times, and 10 X’s of different sizes and colours popping up on the screen.A mild and benign form of central sensitization is common and almost immediate after most injuries — after you burn your hand or sprain your ankle, it is your body’s way of protecting itself. But central sensitization can wear on and, in many cases, persist and get worse long after any injury has healed. If you or someone you know has widespread back pain that flares up with the slightest movement, or has osteoarthritis in their hip that seems to spread all the way down their leg, they might have central sensitization.Central sensitization can affect many different functions, not just pain. People with ongoing, maladaptive central sensitization can be tense and forgetful, and sensitive to bright lights, loud noises and chemicals. It is also a feature of irritable bowel syndrome, migraine and chronic fatigue syndrome, and often goes hand in hand with anxiety and depression.So long, labelled line: Grappling with complexity“Pain cannot easily be divided from the emotions surrounding it. Apprehension sharpens it, hopelessness intensifies it, loneliness protracts it by making hours seem like days. The worst pain is unexplained pain” — Hilary Mantel“The basic idea of pain modulation implies that the output can be different to the input at every stage in the transmission of pain signals throughout the brain” — Fernando CerveroCentral sensitization is just one discovery that has enhanced our understanding of pain. There are many more examples. Descending modulation is the ongoing process by which the brain sends signals down the spinal cord to simultaneously inhibit and facilitate incoming danger signals, a mechanism Leriche anticipated when he observed that battlefield wounds “carry […] their own anaesthetics with them”. In people with persistent pain, descending modulation may be set for a net facilitation of incoming danger messages. Researchers have also expanded our understanding to include the immune system, which aids and abets the nervous system as it produces pain. They have found out that nociceptors, far from lying waiting for an intense stimulus as Sherrington imagined, are actually firing regularly throughout the day, every time we use a pair of scissors, ride a bike or go on a long walk, without (if we are lucky) our neuromatrix producing the experience of pain. Conversely, clever experiments have shown that nociception is not even necessary for pain, giving credence to the stories of people who narrowly escape injury but, believing they have been hurt, writhe in agony. And, we know that stress, even the stress of early life events, plays a vital role in ongoing pain, and that our stress system and pain production system are intimately linked.The contrast between the byzantine, distributed complexity of the mechanisms of pain and the singular experience of pain — I feel it here — is remarkable. Scientists have made various attempts to simplify the mechanisms into something more understandable and more useful to lay people. The neuroscientist VS Ramachandran has said that “pain is an opinion on the organism’s state of health rather than a mere reflective response to an injury”, a stark contrast to the old-fashioned idea of pain as “the unerring medical compass that serves as a guide to the pathological lesion”.The scientists and physiotherapists Dave Butler and Lorimer Moseley put it elegantly:“We will experience pain when our credible evidence of danger related to our body is greater than our credible evidence of safety related to our body. Equally we won’t have pain when our credible evidence of safety is greater than our credible evidence of danger.”In other words, pain is not measuring damage, it is a protective strategy, just one of many (along with local and systemic inflammation, changes in movement like tensing or bracing, the feeling of stiffness, and so on) that the body enacts in response to credible evidence of danger.This evidence of danger often includes nociception (signals from tissue damage), but the neuromatrix uses many other sources, too. For example, if someone has back pain and a doctor tells you your x-ray shows “wear and tear” or “degeneration” in your spine, they have received a clear message of danger related to your body that is likely to make their pain worse. Indeed, people with back pain who get an MRI actually reduce their chances of recovery. On the other hand, if that person’s doctor (or physiotherapist!) tells them that the findings on their scan are normal age-related changes (or, better yet, doesn’t order a scan at all), that is a clear safety message. Safety messages can come from anywhere. Exercise can send safety messages to your neuromatrix, and so can a supportive workplace or having a friend around to talk to.ReflectionsSlow progress, hopes for the future and a note of cautionSlow progress“I am still not happy with what has been accepted” — Pat Wall, 1999Danger sharpens pain; safety soothes it. Why, then, do health professionals continue to give people with persistent pain credible evidence of danger? Apart from the obvious — that there is money in telling people their spines are crumbling and their pelvises are out of line, that they have muscle knots that need releasing and cores that need stabilizing — it is because, just as Descartes’ model of pain took almost three centuries to reach its zenith in Western culture, the neuromatrix, still only forty years old, has been accepted only falteringly even in medical circles, and hardly at all in the wider culture.Indeed, in many ways the twentieth century has doubled down on labelled line. Take, for example, the dominance of the orthopaedic understanding of low back pain, which the late Scottish doctor and historian Gordon Waddell called “the dynasty of the disc”. Waddell traces the tenuous association of the lumbar disc with low back pain to a fateful cluster of papers published at the beginning of the century by orthopods searching, like Victorian physicians had done before them, for a pot of gold at the (wrong) end of the labelled line. Even today, routine orthopaedic surgeries like lumbar fusion, knee arthroscopy and shoulder decompression are amongst the most low-value, least evidence-based treatments in healthcare, still performed largely because of inertia and unexamined Cartesianism.Many physiotherapists practice with the same habits. Like Joseph Swann, we might conduct a questionable root-cause analysis up or down a kinetic chain to find an ‘issue in the tissues’, settling on a pronated foot, a slumped posture or a valgus (in-falling) knee. Like Josiah Nott, when a patient has failed a course of ‘corrective’ exercise to ‘fix’ their body we might decide their problem is primarily ‘psycho-social’, a euphemism for in-their-mind. This is understandable, it takes great effort to shift from Cartesianism to the neuromatrix; I have been trying for years and I am still astonished when a new study is published showing, for example, that there are no major physical risk factors for a first episode of neck pain, but multiple psychological ones, like depression, and social ones, like role conflict. Still, it is imperative that medical professionals of all stripes challenge their colleagues who promote themselves as experts but who practice with unreconstructed Cartesianism.Hopes for the Future“While pain sufferers do not have the luxury of denying the reality of their pain, they can and do deny its legitimacy, thereby internalising the stigma so frequently directed at people in pain.” — Daniel GoldbergThe neuromatrix model has the potential to be immensely liberating for patients. For people with everyday predicaments of life like the back or shoulder pain we all get from time to time, there is the reassuring message that pain is not an indicator of damage and they are safe to move. In fact, movement, as opposed to protecting the painful joint, is the way to go in the long run. For people with more profound, widespread and recalcitrant pain, understanding why their pain is the way it is can help with the process of acceptance, and knowing pain is multifactorial can open up new therapeutic options to help calm down a sensitive nervous system.The neuromatrix could also militate against the way Cartesian thinking drives stigmatization of people with chronic pain. Cartesian dualism casts pain as a two-step sequence of events: the body senses pain, then the mind reacts. As recently as the 1980s, words like “hysterical” or “psychogenic” were used to describe people who appeared to be ‘over-reacting’ to their pain. It is this thinking that allows us to sort people into those who are responding appropriately to their pain, and those who are ‘being dramatic’. The saddest effect of this stigma is when patients internalise it, believing that they are not ‘coping’ properly with ‘a bit of back pain’.So patients and health professionals need to know that dualism is bogus: as Pat Wall himself put it, “the separation of sensation from perception was quite artificial… sensory and cognitive mechanisms operate as a whole”. Or, in the words of neuroscientist Fernando Cervero, “emotional, sensory and cognitive elements aren’t organised in a hierarchical way, but in a cooperative way […] interacting to generate the final pain experience”.A note of caution“Nineteenth century physicians drain[ed] pain of any intrinsic meaning altogether, making it little more than a sign or symptom of something else” — Joanna Burke“[The challenge is] to allow a rapprochement between the world of the clinician and the world of the person in pain” — Quinter et. al (2008).The neuromatrix and all its attendant discoveries have revolutionised how medical and health professionals should approach people in pain. It is a rare true paradigm shift. But there is danger in complacency. “Now is not a time for professional hubris or the proclamation of truth by a few”, warn the rheumatologists John Quintner and Milton Cohen. The battle to understand pain is only half won. It is all too easy to be drawn back into the orbit of dualism, not only between the mind and body, but between the clinician and the patient, or the researcher and the sufferer. Centuries-old habits die hard, and we have long made the person-in-pain an object of enquiry. But this can only take us so far; as Quinter and Cohen assert, “the pain of another person is irreducible to its neuronal correlates”. We can only really know pain through dialogue.It is difficult to talk properly about pain. Being in deep pain can be a harrowing, abject, solitary experience. And apart from anything else, often we just don’t have the words: Virginia Woolf, no stranger to pain, lamented that English has a rich vocabulary for love, but a meagre one for pain. The poet Emily Dickinson said that pain “has an element of blank”.But it can be done. Joletta Belton, a blogger with persistent pain, recently tweeted about the two clinicians who had helped her the most. “It wasn’t just their words” she wrote, “it was that they listened first. And understood. Listening matters […] I wasn’t interrupted or lectured, they didn’t try to ‘educate’ me or alter my narrative to suit their own […] I felt what I said was of value. I felt human, of worth. That’s invaluable.”It may seem strange to end a post about science with a note on the importance of listening, but in the context of the neuromatrix it makes perfect sense. Listening to people in pain is what’s needed to undo the damage that has been done, and take the progress that’s been made to the next level.Belton’s experience echoes a vignette reported by Joanna Bourke in The Story of Pain.During a medical consultation in 1730, an embarrassed patient found himself apologising to his physician for boring him with “so tedious a Tale”. The patient’s physician protested: “Your Story is so diverting, that I take abundance of delight in it, and your Ingenious way of telling it, gives me a greater insight into your distemper, than you imagine. Wherefore, let me beg of you to go on, Sir: I am all attention, and shall not interrupt you.”Selected bibliographyJournal ArticlesAllan, D. and Waddell, G. (1989). An historical perspective on low back pain and disability. Acta Orthopaedica Scandinavica, 60(sup234), pp.1–23.Arnaudo, E. (2017). Pain and dualism: Which dualism?. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 23(5), pp.1081–1086.Baliki, M. and Apkarian, A. (2015). Nociception, pain, negative moods, and behavior selection. Neuron, 87(3), pp.474–491.Bourke, J. (2014). Pain sensitivity: an unnatural history from 1800 to 1965. Journal of Medical Humanities, 35(3), pp.301–319.Brodal, P. (2017). A neurobiologist’s attempt to understand persistent pain. Scandinavian Journal of Pain, 15(1).Cohen, M., Quintner, J., Buchanan, D., Nielsen, M. and Guy, L. (2011). Stigmatization of Patients with Chronic Pain: The Extinction of Empathy. Pain Medicine, 12(11), pp.1637–1643.Chapman, C., Tuckett, R. and Song, C. (2008). Pain and stress in a systems perspective: reciprocal neural, endocrine, and immune interactions. The Journal of Pain, 9(2), pp.122–145.Eriksen, T., Kerry, R., Mumford, S., Lie, S. and Anjum, R. (2013). At the borders of medical reasoning: aetiological and ontological challenges of medically unexplained symptoms. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 8(1), p.11.Goldberg, D. (2012). Pain without lesion: debate among American neurologists, 1850–1900. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 0(15).Goldberg, D. (2017). Pain, objectivity and history: understanding pain stigma. Medical Humanities, 43(4), pp.238–243.Iannetti, G. and Mouraux, A. (2010). From the neuromatrix to the pain matrix (and back). Experimental Brain Research, 205(1), pp.1–12.Kerry, R., Maddocks, M. and Mumford, S. (2008). Philosophy of science and physiotherapy: An insight into practice. Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 24(6), pp.397–407.Latremoliere, A. and Woolf, C. (2009). Central sensitization: A generator of pain hypersensitivity by central neural plasticity. The Journal of Pain, 10(9), pp.895–926.Melzack, R. (1999). From the gate to the neuromatrix. Pain, 82, pp.S121-S126.Melzack, R. (2005). Evolution of the neuromatrix theory of Pain. The Prithvi Raj Lecture: Presented at the Third World Congress of World Institute of Pain, Barcelona 2004. Pain Practice, 5(2), pp.85–94.Melzack, R. and Katz, J. (2012). Pain. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 4(1), pp.1–15.Mendell, L. (2014). Constructing and deconstructing the gate theory of pain. Pain, 155(2), pp.210–216.Moayedi, M. and Davis, K. (2013). Theories of pain: from specificity to gate control. Journal of Neurophysiology, 109(1), pp.5–12.Moseley, G. and Butler, D. (2015). Fifteen years of explaining pain: the past, present, and future. The Journal of Pain, 16(9), pp.807–813.Moseley, G. (2007). Reconceptualising pain according to modern pain science. Physical Therapy Reviews, 12(3), pp.169–178.Neilson, S. (2015). Pain as metaphor: metaphor and medicine. Medical Humanities, 42(1), pp.3–10.O’Sullivan, P., Caneiro, J., O’Keeffe, M. and O’Sullivan, K. (2016). Unraveling the complexity of low back pain. Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy, 46(11), pp.932–937.Perl, E. (2007). Ideas about pain, a historical view. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8(1), pp.71–80.Quintner, J., Cohen, M., Buchanan, D., Katz, J. and Williamson, O. (2008). Pain Medicine and Its Models: Helping or Hindering?. Pain Medicine, 9(7), pp.824–834.Thacker, M. and Moseley, G. (2012). First-person neuroscience and the understanding of pain. The Medical Journal of Australia, 196(6), pp.410–411.Wiech, K. (2016). Deconstructing the sensation of pain: The influence of cognitive processes on pain perception. Science, 354(6312), pp.584–587.Woolf, C. (2007). Central sensitization. Anesthesiology, 106(4), pp.864–867.BooksCervero, F. (2014). Understanding pain. Boston: Mit Press.Butler, D. and Moseley, G. (2015). Explain pain. Adelaide: Noigroup Publications.Bourke, J. (2014). The story of pain. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.Moseley, G. and Butler, D. (2017). Explain pain supercharged. Adelaide: Noigroup Publications.Blog postsPain is weird by Paul IngrahamPain really is in the mind, but not in the way you think by Lorimer MoseleyCentral sensitization in chronic pain by Paul IngrahamMy own chronic pain story by Paul IngrahamEasing musculoskeletal pain Information leafletTell me your story by Joletta BeltonPodcasts and lecturesThe Pain Revolution by Lorimer MoseleyPain: past, present and future with Mick ThackerUnderstanding Pain in 2025 by Mick Thacker Subscribe at tomjesson.substack.com

Today's quote is from American novelist Edith Warton, from her 1902 poem “Vesalius in Zante.” It contains two ways you can help make the world shine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A lecture by Mark Somos (BSR; Sussex; Harvard)

In the 16th century, physician Andreas Vesalius described how a suffocating animal could be kept alive by inserting a tube into its trachea and blowing air to inflate its lungs. Today, Vesalius's treatise is recognized as the first description of mechanical ventilation— a crucial practice in modern medicine. So how do our modern ventilators work? Alex Gendler explains the life-saving technology. [Directed by Artrake Studio, narrated by Addison Anderson].

Ajude nosso novo projeto no Catarse: https://www.catarse.me/sortilegios_incantations. Apoie o canal: https://apoia.se/podcastdaraphus. Ou adquira nossos livros em nosso site: http://raphuspress.weebly.com. Dúvidas sobre envio, formas de pagamento, etc.: http://raphuspress.weebly.com/contact.html. Episódio XXXIV - O calvário do homem artificial – Da fábrica humana ao homem máquina (Parte 2) “(…) e julguemos que o corpo de um homem vivo difere do de um morto como um relógio, ou outro autômato (isto é, outra máquina que se mova por si mesma), quando está montado e tem em si o princípio corporal dos movimentos para os quais foi instituído, com tudo o que se requer para a sua ação, difere do mesmo relógio, ou outra máquina, quando está quebrado e o princípio de seu movimento para de agir.” (“As paixões da alma”, de René Descartes) Trigésimo quarto episódio do Podcast da editora Raphus Press: Em nossa senda atrás dos vestígios e rastros mais insólitos do “Frankenstein” de Mary Shelley (e de suas adaptações e interpretações, como a extraordinária peça “Presunção, ou a Sina de Frankenstein” de Richard Brinsley Peake), entramos na seara (por vezes tão árida) da filosofia. E é nela que há um confronto essencial, acionado metodologicamente pelas tétricas e impressionantes gravuras de Vesalius, no pensamento transcendental de Descartes e no mecanicismo impressionante de Julien Offray de La Mettrie e seu “homem máquina”: o conflito entre mente e corpo, entre espírito e matéria, entre corpo vivo e corpo morto. Indicações bibliográficas: - Guinsburg, J.; Romano, Roberto; Cunha, Newton (orgs.). Descartes: Obras Escolhidas. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2010 (http://www.editoraperspectiva.com.br/index.php?apg=detalhe&idc=930&uid=10202017043630155064249066). - La Mettrie, Julien Offray. O homem máquina. Lisboa: Estampa, 1982. - Ruston, Sharon. The Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Disponível em: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-science-of-life-and-death-in-mary-shelleys-frankenstein. - Vesalius, Andreas [de Bruxelas]. De Humani Corporis Fabrica. São Paulo/Campinas: Ateliê Editorial/Ed. Unicamp/Imprensa Oficial, 2003. E não se esqueça de colaborar com o projeto de “Presunção, ou A Sina de Frankenstein”, já disponível na plataforma Catarse: https://www.catarse.me/frankenstein. Música: “Homenaje pour le tombeau de Debussy”, de Manuel de Falla, executado por Aitua (via http://freemusicarchive.org/). Nosso podcast também está disponível nas seguintes plataformas: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4NUiqPPTMdnezdKmvWDXHs - Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/podcast-da-raphus-press/id1488391151?uo=4 - Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xMDlmZmVjNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw%3D%3D

In this episode, we cover one of the most influential books in the history of surgery, the 'De Humane Corporis Fabrica', and its author, Andreas Vesalius. In doing so, we'll also explore the outsized influence of the ancient Roman physician Galen on anatomical knowledge, and the challenges Vesalius faced in shaking the yoke of tradition through empirical evidence. One of the giants of Renaissance medicine, Vesalius laid the groundwork for the modern field of anatomy, and in so doing, modern surgery as well.

Libby looks at Dissections & Vesalius for your GCSE History exam. In this episode, she will look at the work of Vesalius and his two writings. Ideal for preparing for your GCSE History exam. For more info visit https://www.senecalearning.com/blog/gcse-history-revision-guide

The Museums Department records selected lectures and events held at the Hunterian Museum and archives the recordings for the public. These recordings were made during 2014.

Thanks for joining us again for a very special episode 126.  In this episode, along with special guest Ben Warren, Ryan and Jose tackle Clive's most ambitious and important novel, Imajica.  This is one we've been looking forward to for years, and Ben Warren even composed some music to go along with one of his favorite parts.  We hope that we did it justice, but feel free to comment your thoughts about Imajica on the web site, Facebook or Twitter, and we'll get it in our next episode. Sponsor:  Jorte Calendar: http://bit.ly/pinheadcalendar SHOW NOTES: Clive on Imajica Pie'oh'Pah by Clive Barker Imajica on Goodreads Kirkus Reviews on Imajica Cradle of Chzercemit by Ben Warren (hudwink on Soundcloud) Ben Warren's Soundcloud:  http://soundcloud.com/hudwink Revelations Interview with Jose's Imajica / Abarat question Clive Barker interview for Marvel Age, December 1991 Vesalius's "De Humani Corporis Fabrica"   On the Site, and Coming Soon 10 Things Clive Barker Fans Shouldn't Do, funny comment  http://www.clivebarkercast.com/2013/10/22/10-things-clive-barker-fans-shouldnt-do/ Lord of Illusions Audio Commentary Hellbound Audio Commentary Hellraiser III Aucio Commentary (Coming Soon) Jericho Review (Currently Editing, tease special guest) Ben Warren's Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/hudwink The Clive Barker Podcast (or @Barkercast) is an independent  editorial fan site and podcast that is not affiliated with or under contract by Clive Barker or Seraphim Films.  This is a labor of love by the fans, for the fans. web www.clivebarkercast.com iTunes (Leave a review!), Stitcher,Libsyn, Tunein, Pocket Casts, Google Play, DoubleTwist and YouTube. Facebook and Join the Occupy Midian group Twitter: @BarkerCast | @OccupyMidian

Microplastics For the first time, scientists have studied the abundance of microplastics in deep sea sediments They have found that tiny fibres of plastic are everywhere and that levels found in the ocean sediments are 4 times higher than in contaminated sea-surface waters. Marine debris, mostly consisting of plastic, is a global problem, negatively impacting wildlife, tourism and shipping. However, despite the durability of plastic, and the exponential increase in its production, there was a considerable proportion of the manufactured plastic that was unaccounted for. But now scientists have found that deep-sea sediments are a likely sink for microplastics. Holey Ice You'd have thought, given how much water and ice there is around, that we'd know pretty much all there is to know about them. Among the notable facts is that ice is less dense than water - which is why it floats on your pond rather than sinking to the bottom. But like carbon - which exists in two distinct forms, diamond and graphite - the molecules in solid H2O can be packed in many different ways. And this week, scientists have found another completely different form of ice, which is perhaps stranger than all the others. Overeating Why do some people overeat? In order to find out, brave scientists tucked into 9000 calorie meals. Vesalius Andreas Vesalius, the founder of the modern science of anatomy was born 500 years ago, on the 31st December 1514. He was a proponent of, and yet, a strong critic of the ancient Greek physician Galen, who implied human anatomy from animal dissections. Vesalius challenged physicians and medical scholars to get their hands dirty and carry out dissections themselves. Producer: Fiona Roberts.

Dr. J. Mario Molina, discusses, "Osler, Cushing, and Vesalius". Dr. Molina is CEO of Molina Healthcare, Inc. and a rare book collector. This talk was included in the conference session topic titled, “Vesalius’s Legacy and the History of Collecting”.

Melvyn Bragg examines the history of mankind's quest to understand the human body. The Greeks thought we were built like pigs, and when Renaissance man first cut his sacred flesh it was an act of heresey. We trace the noble ambitions of medical science to the murky underworld of Victorian grave robbing, we trace 2000 years of anatomical study. From the great showman Vesalius, enthralling the Renaissance Artists in the operating theatres of Italy to the sad and gruesome pursuits of Burke and Hare, Anatomy is mankind's often frustrated attempt to understand the body of man. What role has science, religion and art played in the quest to understand the male and the female body?With Harold Ellis, Clinical Anatomist, School of Biomedical Sciences, King's College, London; Ruth Richardson, Historian, and author of Death, Dissection and the Destitute, Phoenix Press; Andrew Cunningham, Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in the History of Medicine, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University.

Melvyn Bragg examines the history of mankind's quest to understand the human body. The Greeks thought we were built like pigs, and when Renaissance man first cut his sacred flesh it was an act of heresey. We trace the noble ambitions of medical science to the murky underworld of Victorian grave robbing, we trace 2000 years of anatomical study. From the great showman Vesalius, enthralling the Renaissance Artists in the operating theatres of Italy to the sad and gruesome pursuits of Burke and Hare, Anatomy is mankind's often frustrated attempt to understand the body of man. What role has science, religion and art played in the quest to understand the male and the female body?With Harold Ellis, Clinical Anatomist, School of Biomedical Sciences, King's College, London; Ruth Richardson, Historian, and author of Death, Dissection and the Destitute, Phoenix Press; Andrew Cunningham, Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in the History of Medicine, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University.