The Evolution of Modern Medicine

Leonardo was done fifty years before Vesalius! Compare, too, this figure of the bones of the foot with a similar one from Vesalius.(24) Insatiate in experiment, intellectually as greedy as Aristotle, painter, poet, sculptor, engineer, architect, mathematician, chemist, botanist, aeronaut, musician and withal a dreamer and mystic, full accomplishment in any one department was not for him! A passionate desire for a mastery of nature's secrets made him a fierce thing, replete with too much rage! But for us a record remains—Leonardo was the first of modern anatomists, and fifty years later, into the breach he made, Vesalius entered.(25) (*) This plate was lacking among the author's illustrations, but the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum remembers his repeatedly showing special interest in the sketch reproduced in John Addington Symonds's Life of Michelangelo, London, 1893, Vol. I, p. 44, and in Charles Singer's Studies in the History and Method of Science, Oxford, 1917, Vol. I, p. 97, representing Michael Angelo and a friend dissecting the body of a man, by the light of a candle fixed in the body itself.—Ed. (24) He was the first to make and represent anatomical cross sections. See Leonardo: Quaderni d'Anatomia, Jacob Dybwad, Kristiania, 1911-1916, Vol. V. (25) See Knox: Great Artists and Great Anatomists, London, 1862, and Mathias Duval in Les Manuserits de Leonard de Vince: De l'Anatomie, Feuillets A, Edouard Rouveyre, Paris, 1898. For a good account of Leonardo da Vinci see Merejkovsky's novel, The Forerunner, London, 1902, also New York, Putnam.