from Ch. 9 of The Great Shadow
[ dedicated to her father, a physician
James LaFayette Wise, Jr. ]
pp. 100-101
Vesalius and other anatomists
had inched toward understanding. .
In his drawings he sometimes
sketched the corpse on the
dissection slab. . .sometimes
as if it were carrying the
occupations of life. . .
The artist Leonardo da Vinci, a
frequent attender of public
dissections, saw with the clarity
that characterized so much of
his work that humans were now
subjects of study -- like waters,
or rocks, or earth. His illu-
strations and notebooks, treat
the body in just this way. He
used the principles of
hydrodynamics to illustrate
the movement of blood through
the heart and the production
of urine; he mined geology,
another of da Vinci's pre-
occupations, to compare human
bones to rocks, and the fluids
of the body as the cycling
waters of the earth; he turned
to the complex and abstract
mediveal science of weights
and measures, to explain the
mechanics of body movement.
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