What is the history of anatomy atlases?
Although anatomical illustrations have existed for millennia, the anatomy atlas as a free-standing educational resource is only a little over a hundred years old. The use of an organized set of anatomical images for representing anatomical knowledge, however, can be traced back 450 years. It was Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica published in 1543 (Cushing, 1943; Saunders and O’Malley, 1950), which first combined a systematic and comprehensive graphical representation of the human body with narrative text . An earlier attempt undertaken with a similar objective by Leonardo da Vinci, in collaboration with the anatomist Marcantonio della Torre, was abandoned, like so many of the artist’s grandiose projects, long before its completion. Until Fabrica, anatomical knowledge was communicated through text, essentially devoid of illustrations, and was dominated by the “infallible” Galen. The revolutionary step taken by Vesalius was to communicate a coherent body of knowledge through graphical
