Charles Estienne’s La dissection des parties du corps humain diuisee en trois liures, 1546

The year is 1546. King Henry VIII is on the throne of England. In Rome, a 71-year old Michelangelo is appointed the chief architect of the still unfinished, St Peter’s Basilica. In Paris, the vellum covered French edition of Charles Estienne’s La dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres (1545) is published. This book, now close to 500 years old, is the oldest object held in RANZCOG’s Historical Collection.

Figure 1. Title page of Charles Estienne’s La dissection des parties du corps humain diuisee en trois liures, 1546. (RANZCOG Frank Forster Library collection)

Charles Estienne (1504-1564), born in Paris, was the son of the notable printer, Henri Estienne. Between 1530 and 1534, Estienne studied in Padua, “learning Greek, botany, and natural science.” He later returned to Paris, undertaking medical study under the tutelage of Jaques Dubois (Sylvius) and obtaining his doctor’s degree from the University of Paris in 1542.

With his printing connections, and medical knowledge, Estienne was ideally placed to add to the literature of medicine, with a particular interest in anatomy. Prior to the 1540s, only one fully illustrated anatomical text existed – Jacopo Berengario de Capri’s Isagoge breves, published in 1522. During the 1530s, while studying under Sylvius, Estienne began the compilation of what would eventually become his own anatomical atlas.

To this end, Estienne hired a former classmate from the University of Paris, Etienne de la Rivière, to provide anatomical drawings for his atlas. By the late 1530s, work on the manuscript was complete, and Estienne was set to publish. However publication was halted when a lawsuit was brought against Charles Estienne by de la Rivière, who accused him of plagiarism and demanded credit for performing “the dissections on which the illustrations were based.”¹ The suit was successful, and Estienne “was required to credit de la Rivière in his text for anatomical preparations and figures.” This process delayed publication of Estienne’s atlas until 1545, by which time another classmate of Estienne, Andreas Vesalius, had published his own illustrated anatomical atlas, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543). Vesalius’s encyclopaedic text was revolutionary. Stretching to seven volumes, and complete with exquisite illustrations, it has since become one of the most famous and highly regarded texts in the history of medicine and anatomy.

Despite being overshadowed by the work of Vesalius, Estienne’s publication was nonetheless very significant. It was “the first text to illustrate step by step dissections,”³ with illustrations in the atlas being derived from real dissections undertaken by Estienne and de la Rivière. The construction of many of these images is fascinating. To complete his work, “Estienne took some of his illustrations from non-anatomical books, replacing a section of the woodblock with an insert that depicted the body’s interior.”¹ Some have suggested this was a cost saving measure, while others have suggested this was a deliberate choice on behalf of Estienne to evoke “the antiquity of dissection”.³ Whatever the intention, the result of this decision is a series of fantastic illustrations where anatomy illustrations have been inserted into the bodies of nude figures “in heroic poses in a variety of classical landscapes, exposed on marble seats or propped up against trees.”³

Figure 2. An illustration from Estienne’s atlas. Note the very clear rectangle around the illustration of the uterus, indicating that a smaller woodcut has been inserted into a pre-existing illustration to create this image. (RANZCOG Frank Forster Library collection)

For illustrations of the female reproductive system, and the uterus, Estienne utilised poses “from a series of erotic prints by Jacopo Caraglio,”¹ and it has been suggested that the atlas was “popular beyond the academics of the day due to the often-erotic positions used in the illustrations.” It is possible that this may even have been used “as a marketing ploy to sell copies outside of the local universities.”³

Figure 3. Another image from Estienne’s atlas. Deliberately provocative, or a cost saving measure? You be the judge. (RANZCOG Frank Forster Library collection)

Historical recognition has arguably been unkind to Charles Estienne. Partly by virtue of being a contemporary of the famed Andreas Vesalius, Estienne’s own contributions to reshaping medical orthodoxy have often been overlooked. Gernot Rath writes that “far more than any of his contemporaries Estienne ventured to doubt tradition… in his work,” and was one of the first to cast doubt upon the teachings of Galen, a Roman and Green physician whose ideas had dominated medicine for more than a millennia.⁴ Markatos and others agree, claiming that Estienne “was a real man of the Renaissance in his attempt to trust his own dissection and to criticize the traditional anatomic knowledge of his era.”²

Estienne was also a medical innovator. He was the first person to demonstrate the existence of a canal through the spinal cord, as well “the first to trace blood-feeding microvessels into the substance of bone.”² He recognised that “the esophagus and trachea were different organs with an entirely different function and purpose,” and was also “a pioneer in the description and importance of the lymphatic system.”²

It would be an understatement to say medicine has changed a lot in 500 years. Estienne’s La dissection des parties du corps humain diuisee en trois liures is a tangible reminder of where we have come from, having been published at a time when long-accepted ideas about anatomy and the human body were on the cusp of being completely reconceptualised. Who knows where medical knowledge will take us in another 500 years?

Charles Estienne’s La dissection des parties du corps humain diuisee en trois liures (1546) was gifted to the Australian Regional Council of RCOG by its parent body in 1954. It was one of the very first objects acquired into the College’s Historical Collection.