[As published in THE WATERMARK :Newsletter of the Achivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences, Vol XIX, Number 1, Winter 1995]

It seemed a brilliant idea at the time. Sort of like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland's exclaiming, "We can put on our own show." While wolfing down Chinese take-out in my office one rainy afternoon, our team of medical historians, illustrators, graduate students, librarians and medical technologists came up with, "Let's make a video." What a natural. A piece of cake. We would recreate the dissections that Vesalius performed at Bologna in 1540, and videotape them. Four hundred fifty years after Vesalius' investigations we would show students just how these structures looked in the human body explaining why he drew the conclusions he did about them.

We even had a text. Ruben Eriksson had found and translated the eye-witness account of the Bologna dissections written by a young German student, Baldasar Heseler, who attended all of the procedures. These lecture notes brought to life the work and thought of Vesalius at one point in his paradigm shift from the Galenism of his Tabula sex to the neuroanatomy of De humani corporis fabrica of 1543.

In 1990, I had been dragooned into helping out in the gross anatomy course. Much of what I had learned about the subject, in the twenty-five years since I tool the course was long gone, but the idea of filming parts of a dissection just as Andreas Vesalius had done some 450 years ago held a fascination for me, and for those of us who were convinced we could do it. Together we succeeded in convincing departmental gurus to allot us a cadaver.

One of my graduate students was taking gross. She had returned to graduate studies after raising her family and hoped to earn a Ph.D. sometime before her husband retired. Having recovered from the first-day shock of pulling back the large black zippers to unseal the contents of the blue vinyl body bag, she soon found that the skills developed in the domestic sphere came in handy. For anyone who has done needle-point, she assured me, dissecting out vessels is just a matter of patience.

Other co-workers were recruited through pure serendipity. A skilled and dedicated technologist in the anatomy department filmed our dissections donating many more hours of his time than I care to remember. Having wandered into the coffee room one afternoon, I inquired if anyone was working on the rete mirabile, a vascular network that Galen believed existed in the human brain, but which is known now only to exist in ungulates. "Oh," said one of our colleagues, "a lady anatomist down at the Riverside campus has spent the last two years investigating its role as a temperature regulator in sheep." The Riverside investigator supplies us with a beautiful slide of the rete, and the anatomist who referred us to her became our expert authority and mentor. It pays to drop into the coffee room, occasionally.

Our skilled and very patient film producer has spent over fifteen years filming neuropsychiatric interviews. The idea that all the nervous breakdowns connected with this project would be behind the camera intrigued him. We were working one Saturday in his lab, when an aftershock from the Landers earthquake struck. After we extricated our producer from under his desk, he noticed that his last shot had recorded not only the rete mirabile, but the tremblor as well. The shaking rete was the hit of our completion party.

The film's script was cobbled together from some of the most important sentences from Eriksson's text. Vesalius' confrontation with the elder professor, Matteo Corti, also added some dramatic and authentic flavor to the presentation. A young would-be actor loved his role as the young Vesalius, likewise an older, internationally
renowned physiologist gave up a Saturday morning to read Corti's lines. The manager of our Index of Medieval Medical Manuscripts (IMMI) became Heseler, and he convinced us that we needed more graphic material than just shots of the human cadaver.

Fortunately, for over twenty years we had been collecting slides, woodcuts and other depictions of Vesalius' life ad times. Virtually our entire collection was drawn into the project. The librarians in the History Division of the Louise Darling Biomedical Library were never wearied of our constant demands for just one more book, or just one more picture. Having used these materials freely, and after the film was almost finished, we discovered we needed permission to use some of the pictures.

The worst example of this aspect of the project was H.M. the Queen. Leonardo da Vinci, who conducted dissections of his own, and should have known better, drew a sketch of the heart channels transecting the interventricular septum. It is a lovely sketch, incorrect of course, but the work of an artistic genius nonetheless. We used the drawing in the video and then tried to get permission from its owner, Elizabeth, Regina, by the Grace of God, Defender of the
Faith. If any of you ever wants to get permission to use a graphic in the Queen's Collection come to me first. We had one colleague pounding on the door of the stables behind Buckingham Palace. We wrote to Windsor, we called the cultural attaché, we enlisted the services of Los Angeles County Director of Protocol, and finally after eighteen months of negotiation, we were allowed to pay about fifty bucks for the right to use that one sketch. That is one reason that the video that was supposed to take six weeks was not ready for distribution for almost three years. Now that it is finished and is being used by scholars and students in Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and over forty institutions in the United States, the effort seems almost worthwhile. We are grateful for the interest and dedication of the very talented people who participated in the project.

I'll never forget the first time I used it in class, when my voice as first narrator was slowly recognized -- I had been lecturing to them three times a week for seven weeks -- I noticed a scattering of amazed looks. "You made this?" one of them asked. I guess I was the last person they expected to hear on television. I am convinced that the great popularity of the Vesalius essay question on the midterm was not an attempt to flatter me, but the tribute to the power of the image as a pedagogical tool, especially for the students of today.

Ynez Violé O'Neill -- UCLA School of Medicine

PRINTABLE ORDER FORM
FOR VIDEO PURCHASE