Andreas Vesalius was a skilled physician and teacher who lectured in Padua in Italy during the middle of the 1500s. Vesalius was very popular for his dissections of human corpses and he taught the medical students there every inch of human anatomy.

This was quite a revolutionary idea for the time – in other parts of Europe, such as England, cutting up the dead for scientific purposes was strictly forbidden. This led to the long term practice of grave robbing to get bodies to dissect in secret.

Andreas Vesalius wrote and drew extensively about the human body and his immense scientific works were a great source of knowledge for many years after his death and some are still in existence today. Both Vesalius and the artist Leonardo da Vinci, who did intricate sketches of the inside of the human body for art rather than science, were pioneers in human dissection and the science of anatomy.