Vesaliana

INTRODUCTION
in a daily avalanche of new publications concerning the history of medicine and even more so
those about Vesalius, who still plays such a prominent role in it.
A major problem while creating the current list was the impossibility of seeing every
interesting article. Many of them don’t bear the name of Vesalius in their title although they
contain important information on him or his works. When absolute proof of this was lacking
they have not been included. It is our hope that someone having the opportunity to examine
them will be able to include the missing titles.
Some figures may give an idea of the (in)completeness of my ‘unified’ list. Apart from
the Cushing Vesaliana totaling 728 entries I succeeded in gathering 682 new references before
I got the list of Calcoen. Out of his 298 references I had only found 142 of them, but my list
contained already 108 entries with the lemma ‘Vesal’ in the title of references from before
1993 that were missing in his list. This demonstrates clearly the magnitude of what may be
lacking and the need for an update as well.
In recent years many publications have appeared mentioning only once or a few times
the name of Vesalius in a rather casual way without adding much new information. Entering
‘vesalius’ on the search page of www.amazon.com delivers more than 500 (!) of these titles.
For each book this powerful search engine mostly produces an review quoting all the
references to Vesalius, including those in the index, and making it possible to read on line the
complete page where they are found. For this reasons they have not been added to this list.
New titles
Many existing and valuable data and ideas remain hidden. Some scholars have carried
out a lot of research of Vesalius and his works but only presented their results in courses or
talks, without publishing their work. I wish to apologize to those authors whose work is
mentioned partially or has been omitted. They are invited to let me know of any gaps or
inaccuracies that they may find. Thus we can hope to maintain a solid and practical list of
Vesaliana that will stay up-to-date and accessible to anyone interested.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
My sincere thanks go to Apr. G. DE MUNCK, president of the Koninklijke
Apothekersvereniging van Antwerpen (KAVA), who was so kind to give me a copy of R.
Calcoen’s article and to Herwig DEUMENS of the Koninklijke Academie voor Geneeskunde
van België for his most valuable remarks and suggestions. My sincere gratitude goes
especially to Elly COCKX-INDESTEGE for her invaluable advice and continuous support
through-out the project. Finally I wish to thank Prof. em. Dr. Omer STEENO (K.U.Leuven),
Dr. Theodoor GODDEERIS (Kortrijk, Belgium), Prof. Jacqueline VONS (Université François
Rabelais - Tours) and Rabbi Edward REICHMAN, MD (Albert Einstein College of Medicine -
New York, Bronx), and all those who supported this work by supplying additional titles.
vii