Vesalius, Willis and the Renaissance Brain

Andreas Vesalius corrected Galen by looking for himself; Thomas Willis turned attention from the ventricles to the brain tissue itself and coined the word 'neurology'.

The Renaissance revived human dissection, and with it a new attitude: check the body, not just the book.

Vesalius

The Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) published De humani corporis fabrica ("On the Fabric of the Human Body") in 1543 — the same year Copernicus published his account of the solar system. Its woodcut illustrations of the brain, in successive horizontal slices, were the most accurate yet produced. Vesalius pointed out that some of Galen's descriptions came from animals, not humans: the rete mirabile, a network of blood vessels at the base of the brain that Galen considered vital for making animal spirits, exists in oxen and sheep but not in people.

Willis and the circle

The English physician Thomas Willis (1621–1675) published Cerebri Anatome in 1664, with illustrations by the young Christopher Wren, later the architect of St Paul's Cathedral. Willis described the ring of arteries at the base of the brain still called the circle of Willis, and introduced the word neurologie — the doctrine of the nerves.

Crucially, Willis shifted attention from the ventricles to the brain's tissue. He linked the cerebral cortex with memory and will, the cerebellum with involuntary functions, and studied patients' symptoms alongside their brains after death — an early form of clinical-anatomical correlation.

A new picture

By the late 17th century, the old cell doctrine was crumbling. The brain itself — its folds, its white and grey matter, its deep structures — became the object of study. What nobody yet understood was how a nerve actually carried a message. That would take electricity.