Andreas Vesalius, a Flemish physician, born in Brussels, Dec. 31, 1514, died in the island of Zante, Oct. 15, 1564. He was educated at Louvain, Montpellier, and Paris, and was early distinguished by his devotion to anatomical studies. In the last named city he became chief assistant of Gunther, and in 1536 discovered the origin of the spermatic blood vessels. The pursuit of practical anatomy was attended with so much difficulty and danger in France, that after returning to Louvain he joined the army of Charles V. of Germany, and went to Italy, where in 1540 he was made professor of anatomy in the university of Pavia, in 1543 in that of Bologna, and not long afterward in that of Pisa. In 1543 he published his great work on anatomy, De Corporis Humani Fabrica (fol., Basel; enlarged ed., 1555). In this Vesalius exposed the errors of the Galenian school, who relied for their knowledge of the anatomy of the human body upon the observations made in the dissection of the bodies of the lower animals. The work met with the fiercest opposition; nevertheless the author's reputation increased. About 1544 he was made chief physician to Charles V., and afterward to his son Philip II.; and the duties which devolved upon him gradually deprived him of all opportunity of increasing his knowledge of anatomy.

In 1563 or 1564 he suddenly left Madrid to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, for reasons not known. On his arrival there he received an offer from the Venetian senate of the professorship of anatomy at Padua. On the voyage back he was wrecked on the island of Zante, where he died probably from fatigue and exposure. Besides his great work, he wrote De Radicis Chinoe Usu Ejiistola (Venice, 1546); Anatomicarum Gabrielis Fallopii Observationum Examen (1564); Examen Apologioe Fr. Putoei pro Galeno.(1564); and a paraphrase and translation of some of the works of the Arabic physician Rhazes. His complete works, together with a life, were published at Leyden in 1725 (2 vols, fol.), edited by Boerhaave and Albinus.