Evolution of the myth of the human rete mirabile traced through text and illustrations in printed books: The case of Vesalius and his plagiarists

Abstract

ABSTRACT Andreas Vesalius initially accepted Galen’s ideas concerning the rete mirabile in humans. In 1538, Vesalius drew a diagram of the human rete mirabile as a plexiform termination of the carotid arteries, where the vital spirit is transformed into the animal spirit, before being distributed from the brain along the nerves to the body. In 1540, Vesalius demonstrated the rete mirabile at a public anatomy, using a sheep’s head (due to his nascent realization that he could not demonstrate this adequately in a human cadaver, potentially eliciting ridicule). By 1543, Vesalius had fully reversed himself, denied the existence of the rete mirabile in humans, and castigated himself for his prior failure to recognize this error in Galen’s works. Vesalius nevertheless illustrated both the Galenic conception of the rete mirabile in humans and a schematic of the rete mirabile in ungulates. He intended the 1543 diagram of the human rete mirabile as an example of a mistake that resulted from Galen’s overreliance on animals as models of human anatomy. However, in spite of Vesalius’s intentions, for more than a century afterward, his figure was repeatedly and perversely plagiarized by advocates for Galenic doctrine, who misused it as a purportedly realistic representation of human anatomy and generally omitted the contrary opinions of Berengario da Carpi and Vesalius. The protracted use of stereotyped representations of the rete mirabile in extant printed illustrations provides tangible documentation of the stagnation in anatomical thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.