Exercise Science and Anatomy

Exercise Science & Anatomy The science of anatomy began long before the invention of the CAT scan, but it couldn't have been done without the inventions of one of the greatest artistic and scientific minds in history, Leonardo da Vinci. Nor could exercise science have become an area of serious investigation and discovery without the work of Leonardo and his successor, Vesalius. Da Vinci was born April 15, 1452, in Vinci, Italy, just outside Florence died on May 2, 1519 in Cloux, France.

When he was a teenager, he thought it would be cool, legend says, to paint a really creepy head. So he brought home all sorts of vermin, including lizards, bats and maggots, and painted a disgusting monster. His father, startled by the realism of the thing, decided his son could only be an artist. (Museum of Science Web site) Leonardo, the artist, often became fascinated with a problem to solve concerning what a human body really looked like.

"His artist's interest in the particular and the concrete, which inspires his careful, precise and accurate observation, is carried further by his inordinate curiosity into a detailed analytic study of the factors involved," wrote the author of The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science. (Randall 123) At times, those observations were carried out in conditions modern people wouldn't dream of enduring.

In 1520, his first biographer, Paolo Giove, wrote that" The first biographer of Leonardo da Vinci, Paolo Giovi, wrote in 1520: "in the medical faculty he learned to dissect the cadavers of criminals under inhuman, disgusting conditions...because he wanted [to examine and] to draw the different deflections and reflections of limbs and their dependence upon the nerves and the joints. This is why he paid attention to the forms of even very small organs, capillaries and hidden parts of the skeleton.

The resulting detailed drawings, which look like modern scientific drawings even today, were among the first to show that there was a physical system to the human body, and that the parts were interrelated and dependent upon each other. (Museum of Science Web site) Not until several decades after Leonardo's drawings were made was the science of anatomy collected in book form. In 1543, the first complete textbook of human anatomy was published.

De Humanis Corporis Fabrica by Vesalius "can only be compared with Hippocrates in stature and importance" in the field of medicine, according to Vesalius, Humanist. (University of Virginia Health Sciences Library Web site.) Vesalius had studied Cicero and Celsus, among the ancient writers, and so he knew that the ancients had dissected human bodies.

(University of Virginia Health Sciences Library Web site.) Vesalius believed that anatomy: should be recalled from the dead, so that if it did not achieve with us a greater perfection that at any other place or time among the old teachers of anatomy, it might at least reach such a point that one could with confidence assert that our modern science of anatomy was equal to that of old (ancient Greek) (University of Virginia Health Sciences Library Web site.) Although Leonardo had created drawings by doing exactly as the ancients had done, they had not been published in book form, and therefore were not generally available to physicians, and Vesalius' work was.

So, Vesalius is credited not only with producing such a book, but making the information about the construction of the human body and its workings generally available. But, as important as Vesalius was to the science of anatomy, without which there could be no exercise science, Leonardo was the key, and: the invention of a.