Andreas Vesalius

Sachiko Kusukawa is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Her books include Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (2012), which won the Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society.

[A] rich, pluralistic intellectual world is exquisitely evoked by Sachiko Kusukawa in her marvellous new book on Vesalius and the Fabrica. Before turning to the man himself, she guides us through the practices of his immediate predecessors . . . The greatest strength of Kusukawa’s book is its meticulous description of the design, composition and preparation of the Fabrica . . . Reaktion has done a wonderful job here, as with other works in its Renaissance Lives series. The illustrations (many in colour) are crisp, and the book is bound with thread rather than glue. Many larger publishers could learn from them. - Dmitri Levitin, Literary ReviewIt is published as part of Reaktion’s excellent Renaissance Lives series, and offers an elegant and knowledgeable entry point to the subject in question - even if in this instance, it is as much about the life of Vesalius’s book as about the man himself. Kusukawa’s account of De Fabrica’s famous images of the human body is particularly skilled . . . Elegant and authoritative, Kusukawa’s book is a perfect introduction both to Vesalius and to the world in which he was able to socially climb - and transform - through his glorious yet somewhat gory medical masterpiece. - Ross MacFarlane, Fortean TimesSachiko Kusukawa’s vivid reconstruction of the making of Vesalius's Fabrica takes us deep inside the world of anatomical demonstrations, hospital postmortems, criminal executions, university lecture halls, humanist libraries and artistic and printing workshops. She explains how Vesalius thought about books, images and bodies, and his skill at instructing Renaissance readers how to look, touch, dissect and model the human body in order to learn from it. There is no better introduction to Vesalius. - Paula Findlen, Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History, Stanford UniversityIn this brilliant digestion of her earlier work, Kusukawa not only reconstructs ‘the making’ of Andreas Vesalius’s masterpiece, Fabrica (and the book’s reception and afterlife), but the making of the man himself. The "founder" of modern anatomy we see in full context, reliant on his peers, his readers and his students in the production of his masterpiece. He is also shown to be a canny negotiator with artists and printers in the making of the book’s famous images. Ultimately Andreas Vesalius: Anatomy and the World of Books compels engagement with the construction of the ‘truthfulness’ of all scientific images, then and now. This is historical anatomy and provocation at its arresting best. - Claudia Stein, Reader in History, University of Warwick