When Andreas Vesalius published the Seven Books on the Fabric of the Human Body in 1543, it was with satisfaction that he created a scandal in the field of medicine and, more generally, among cultivated European readers. Assuming a voice of authority in medicine at the age of twenty-eight, he developed his account of dissection as a series of personal observations and denunciations of poor anatomists, beginning with his masters. But not only was this irreverence public, it also created a public, represented on the frontispiece of the work: it established the book as a tribunal of science. The first victim to be tried was Jacques Dubois, professor in Paris’ Faculty of Medicine; his response, published in 1551, fuelled a lengthy posthumous debate, feeding the controversy upon which Vesalius’s posterity is founded.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Cazes, H., (2025), "La fabrique de la controverse : André Vésale (1514–1564) à la conquête des publics (ou Comment acquérir un nom immortel dans l’histoire des sciences en insultant ses maîtres)", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

  Copy Citation | Export metadata as... | JSON | CSV | RO-Crate | BibTex | EndNote

1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Cazes, Hélène. "La fabrique de la controverse : André Vésale (1514–1564) à la conquête des publics (ou Comment acquérir un nom immortel dans l’histoire des sciences en insultant ses maîtres)." Renaissance and Reformation 42 (1): 2019. 129-162. DOI: 10.7202/1064522ar. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.