Da Vinci: Anatomist

On Sunday 24^th, a friend of mine and I went to see the Da Vinci exhibition in the Queens Gallery, London. The exhibit was displaying the anatomical drawings Leonardo Da Vinci made over 400 years ago. He originally intended them to be published in a treatise, but died before he completed the works. 

Da Vinci was an extraordinary bloke. He was an artist-cum-engineer-cum-scientist. He was the first to document some of the more difficult to define parts of the body (he did a full dissection of the brachial plexus, which is a bundle of crisscrossing nerves, which I gathered was difficult to dissect) as well as identifying structures which would not be identified again for several hundred years. 

In his early career he experienced similar problems to the ones faced by universities today – namely, a regular source of human cadavers. He was, as a result, forced to do many of his dissections on animals. As his career was furthered he gained the fame which unlocked doors to charitable hospices and medical schools, allowing him to study the human anatomy.

Having seen the drawings and sketches close up, it is amazing to see how precise the observations he made were, and it is something which definitely has to be seen to fully comprehend – the photos of the exhibition are good, but there’s an almost religious silence in the gallery, as everyone peers at his drawings, many of them annotated with his characteristic backwards handwriting. 

I was however, disappointed by one thing. Much of the theories in medicine at that time were proposed by Roman or Greek theorists who had not actually dissected a corpse. As a result, much of what he saw did not fit with the models. An example of this would be the three ventricles in the brain, which were thought to house reason, feelings and memory. In this instance, when he pioneered the idea of injecting molten wax into the brain to fully discover what shape these “ventricles” were, he changed the theory and his notes to match with his observation. 

Da Vinci's interpretation of the current theory

Da Vinci's own theory based on observation - much closer!

This is one of the earliest examples of scientific thinking – empirical evidence is the basis for theories. However, later on, he became erratic and started to change what he drew as his observations to fit with the theories of the time. While I understand that it must have been difficult for him to completely dismantle the idea of how the heart works, I still think it was a shame that he couldn’t have kept in line with his observations and used reasoning to propose a new theory based on observation. 

Regardless, the exhibition is amazing and definitely worth seeing. It finishes 07 October, 2012. Get going!