Select language, opens an overlay

Quotation

Leonardo

the Man Who Saved Science
And just as the map of the heavens went unchanged for centuries, so too did the map of the body. Doctors relied on illustrations inherited from ancient Greek and Persian sources. Leonardo would conduct his own medical examinations. Charles Nicholl First sign of Leonardo's actual practical involvement in anatomy and dissection is some wonderful, slightly eerie drawings of a skull, dateable to about 1489. One of the drawings makes it clear that at least one of his interests is to establish by a sort of grid-referencing, the particular location of the “sensus communis”, which is an Aristotelian concept, the communal sense where all the sensory impressions go into the brain and which, was where a man's soul could be found. Leonardo’s first dissections were in search of the soul. His guide: a newly published manual of anatomy by Mondino de Liuzzi, which would remain the authority for 250 years.