Vesalius among the Surgeons

This essay describes the reception of Vesalius’s illustrations of skeletons in Latin and Italian surgery texts in the sixteenth century. The skeletons were part of a visual archive that was produced collaboratively by humanists, editors, translators, and printers. Joining older texts associated with Hippocrates, Galen, and Oribasius, and more recent ones by Giovanni di Vigo and Jean Tagault, the visual archive conveyed information about the treatment of fractures and dislocations, promoted a view of anatomy as medically useful, and helped to organize the medical field of surgery, a field that would eventually extend to artificial body parts, cosmetics, and prosthetics of all kinds.