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© 1999 The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Inc.
ANDREAS VESALIUS. ON THE FABRIC OF THE HUMAN BODY. A TRANSLATION OF DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA LIBRI SEPTEM. BOOK I. THE BONES AND CARTILAGES. William F. Richardson in collaboration with John B. Carman. San Francisco, Norman Publishing, 1998. $225.00, 416 pp.In 1543, there appeared, from Basel, Switzerland, a book written by a young man of twenty-eight whose name was Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564). His folio-tome revolutionized the study of anatomy and corrected many of the then-prevalent errors that had long ago been introduced by Galen of Pergamon (130–200 A.D.) and others. As a medical student, I became fascinated by this work and even wrote an essay on its contribution to the history of medicine; the essay was awarded the Sir William Osler Medal in the History of Medicine in 1978. How ironic that now, more than twenty years later, I am asked to review this magnum opus again. As I went through Vesalius's writings in the 1970s, I was struck by the difficulty of the Latin, written in what has been described as "flatulent pedantics." An even better description is that by Singer and Rabin2, who wrote: "It was found impossible to render into English, a language happily unable to sustain the multi-involuted entanglements of renaissance sycophantic logomachy ... fluent though Vesalius may have been he could not have spoken such tortuous super-elaborated, repetitious rhodomontade." These comments reflect the difficulties that translators have had over the years in dealing with the Latin text of Vesalius. The only previous modern translation that I am aware of was done in the 1940s, in Russian. Now, in the 1990s, I am reminded of the phrase in infinito vacuo, ex fortuita atomorum collisione; in this case, however, the fortunate collision was not between two atoms but rather between a classical Latinist (Richardson) and an anatomist interested in the history of medicine (Carman). The volume starts with a wonderful preface, in which the contributors clearly outline the difficulties of attempting to render the unusual and unknown terminology of Renaissance Latin into readable English. They note that a translation is a "literary creation by the translator, who will be bound by the grammar and style of the language into which the translation is being made. ... English is not as well adapted for writing enormous sentences as is Latin and it has long been accepted as axiomatic that more and shorter sentences in an English translation will represent fewer and longer ones of the Latin original." To attempt to convert a work by a writer such as Vesalius into readable English while accurately reflecting the original meaning and maintaining the original style seems like an awesome feat, but these author-translators have accomplished the task brilliantly. The volume is beautifully laid out by the publisher in a sharp, crisp type, with footnotes and commentary added as needed. The literary translations are rich, colorful, and consistent with what I assume would have been Vesalius's intent, yet they convey the information and the textual context. Allow me to share just two examples: the translations of Vesalius's anatomical descriptions of the skull and the styloid process.
Domicile Provided by Nature for the Brain
Controller and governor of two concupiscible souls, the brain is the seat of reason and sits enthroned like a queen at the summit of the body. That it be guarded by some sort of protective bulwark is therefore in the highest degree expedient; so the provident Creator of everything did not entrust its protection solely to skin and areas of flesh (as in the abdomen) or to bones spaced well apart from each other (as in the chest) but enveloped it completely in bone like a helmet (p. 60).
Styloid Process
I have already referred to a process of the temporal bone which resembles a cow's teat and is therefore described in Greek as mastoeides and in Latin as mammillaris. ... But the temporal bone has also another process growing out not far from the inner side of the mastoid process. This one is elongated, thin, and very solid; it is described in Greek as belonoeides from its resemblance to a needle, or as graphoeides or styloeides from its resemblance to a pen or stylus for writing, or is called the spur from its resemblance to a rooster's spur (p. 73).
These two anatomical descriptions beautifully reflect the style of the language and the florid nature of Vesalius's writing as well as the eloquent translation into English with the author's original intent intact. Interestingly, although this is a large and extensive work with a number of original anatomical descriptions, Vesalius's name is attached to only two structures: the foramen of Vesalius and the vein of Vesalius. The foramen is in the greater wing of the sphenoid bone, between the foramen of ovale and the rotundum, and it is traversed by a small vein (the vein of Vesalius), an emissary vein from the cavernous sinus to the pterygoid plexus. Both of these descriptions have long been lost to modern anatomical texts. In summary, this is a long-overdue work of brilliant scholarship. The translation, along with the translators' notes, results in an accurate and interesting historical text. This work was obviously a labor of love, and the authors are to be complimented on their contribution. Their furor scribendi has resulted in a translation of more than 100,000 words, and this was done without resorting to ponderous antisesquipedalian techniques. To quote Denys Hay1: "Vox audita perit, littera scripta manet (the spoken word passes away, the written words remain)"—how splendid it is to be reintroduced to these written words some twenty years after my original essay and some 455 years after they were originally published! This is indeed a brilliant piece of translation and scholarship.
James T. Goodrich, M.D., Ph.D. Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery Albert Einstein College of Medicine Montefiore Medical Center Bronx, New York
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