The Marginalia That Made Christie's Value This Book at $1 Million

Curious Objects

In 1543 Andreas Vesalius published a seven-part book that would become the foundational text of modern anatomy: On the Fabric of the Human Body. With it, the Flemish anatomist overturned more than a millennium’s worth of medical dogma, many of his breakthroughs coming while dissecting human corpses—a method of study unavailable to physicians of classical antiquity. Part education and part art, Vesalius’s illustrated anatomy is as respected today for its woodcut specimen drawings—flayed “muscle men” and skeletons who pose like figures from medieval paintings—as for its no-nonsense organization . . . and it might have been even better. In this week’s episode, Benjamin Miller speaks with Rhiannon Knol, specialist at Christie’s, which is currently offering Vesalius’s own annotated copy of his book’s second edition. Its margins dark with suggestions—in Latin—for transposition, rephrasing, and new contextual information, this fascinating document of medical history hints at what a third edition would have offered, if not for Vesalius’s untimely death in 1564.

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