[From Vesalius to Descartes: the heart, the life].

At the end of 1629, Descartes, settled in the Lower Countries, began studying anatomy and performing dissections in order to write L'Homme (The Treatise on Man). He acknowledged his debt towards "Vezalius and the others". In those years, in Europe, the influence of Vesalius was increasing, as shown by Rembrandt's Anatomy of Dr Tulp and by the Theatrum anatomicum by Caspar Bauhin. Descartes rejected the divisions of the soul, then a common place in medical treatises, and he stated a principle of life defined by the heath in the heart linked to the new demonstration of the circulation of the blood by William Harvey.