1514-1564. Belgian physician who
revolutionized anatomy. His great innovations
were to perform postmortem dissections and to
make use of illustrations in teaching
anatomy. The dissections (then illegal)
enabled him to discover that Galen's system
of medicine was based on fundamental
anatomical errors. Vesalius' book De Humani
Corporis Fabrica/On The Structure of the
Human Body 1543, together with the astronomer
Copernicus' major work, published in the same
year, marked the dawn of modern science.