Charles Estienne, De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres, Paris: S. Colinaeus, 1545, p. 242, woodcut, leaf height 35 cm, K.7.28.

Charles Estienne (1505-1564) was the son of the famous printer Henry Stephanus and the stepson of another printer, Simon Colines, who printed this book on anatomy. Estienne had a humanist upbringing, but developed an interest in medicine and studied with Jacques Dubois at Paris, where he later taught. This illustrated book had evidently been completed by 1539, but was then delayed in publication when Estienne de la Riviere (d. 1569), a surgeon who had evidently assisted in the dissections and the production of the images, appealed to the medical faculty at Paris, claiming authorship of the book. After some wrangling, the authorship was eventually settled on Estienne and the work was printed in 1545, by which time Vesalius’s Fabrica had already been published.

While some of the images must have been drawn by de la Riviere, several are signed by Mercure Jollat and Geoffrey Tory. The figures of female anatomy are taken from a set of prints by Jacopo Caraglio’s Gli amori degli dei (c. 1500-1505).

The book is divided into three parts: the first parts dealt with the more solid and external parts of the body, namely the bones, the muscles, and the attendant structures. Estienne, like Vesalius, followed Galen in presenting the bones first, because they were the foundation of the subject. Following the recently translated De ossibus by Galen, Estienne described the study of bones as ‘dried anatomy’ and also emphasized its usefulness for surgeons. The second part describes the internal organs, and the third the reproductive organs.

In this woodcut, a dissected body is seated in a segment of a wall with some vegetation, and the cadaver props himself on a branch. One of his feet rests on a plaque with the legends for the structure shown in the image: A is the colon, B the caecum and C the small intestine. Like Vesalius’s figures, many of the figures in Estienne’s book are posed in a landscape with vegetation or inside a decorated room, with plaques used for legends, but the amount of anatomical detail included on a page is very small.