Sachiko Kusukawa. Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. xvii, 331p. (ISBN 9780226465296).

Abstract

The early 1540s saw the publication of several printed and illustrated books that are properly identified as masterpieces of scientific publishing, including, in 1542, Leonhart Fuchs’s De historia stirpium (On the history of plants); and, in 1543, the De humani corporis fabrica libri VII (Seven books on the fabric of the human body) by the Paduan professor Andreas Vesalius. Now, Sachiko Kusukawa, a Fellow in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, has produced a masterful study of Fuchs and Vesalius that advances a powerful argument about the strategies developed by the two authors, working apparently on two very different . . .