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...

(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…