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How Accurate Were Leonardo Da Vinci's Anatomy Drawings?
antdude writes "BBC News answers how accurate were Leonardo da Vinci's anatomy drawings — 'During his lifetime, Leonardo made thousands of pages of notes and drawings on the human body. He wanted to understand how the body was composed and how it worked. But at his death in 1519, his great treatise on the body was incomplete and his scientific papers were unpublished. Based on what survives, clinical anatomists believe that Leonardo's anatomical work was hundreds of years ahead of its time, and in some respects it can still help us understand the body today. So how do these drawings, sketched more than 500 years ago, compare to what digital imaging technology can tell us today?'"
The biggest insight I gleaned from the article was when the author described da Vinci's approach to anatomy as being that of an engineer's and an architect, and how that perspective allowed him to interpret the body structures he saw. Remember high school biology dissection labs? Or if you studied anatomy in college, remember the profound disconnect between seeing a perfectly laid-out diagram of an organism, versus actually going in and dissecting one in reality? You think that when you cut a creature open, that you'll see some version of those drawings just sitting there in front of you, labeled and color-coded and all structures clearly defined. Instead, I acutely remember my surprise when cutting open a rat, a frog, and an earthworm, that all I really saw at first was a jumbled pink/brown mess of innards. Things moved around, didn't have the shape I thought they would, and if someone hadn't already drawn the diagrams I would've been at a complete loss as to how to describe what I saw, let alone try to make an anatomically faithful reproduction of it.
That should give you a better understanding of just how amazing da Vinci's observational skills were.
The rule should be: "any headline which ends in a question mark and which starts with a verb (or a noun/pronoun perhaps also?) ..."
If the first word is "how", "why", "when", "where", "who"... the words "yes" and "no" make no sense as an answer. Oh, you knew that already?
Report Gamemaker to Google. Maybe if they are removed from all search results they will run out of money to carry on this annoying spam campaign.
Clearly you've not done much dissection. Besides being perhaps the greatest artist of his age, virtually invented from whole cloth 2 and 3 point point perspective, hyper-realistic painting, chiaroscuro, anatomically/proportionally correct artwork (look up the "Grotesques"), he was probably one of the greatest scientific minds of all time. His vision, perception was unrivaled. He sketched water flowing over rocks and captured eddies and micro-currents that we can see today only in super high speed stop motion photography. He broke down the relationships between math and the universe. He observed that art was science and that science was art and that everything was mathematics. His inventions are brilliant even by today's standard. He invented the glider, the helicopter, the tank, the submarine, and a thousand other things we'll never know about.
His dissection and further record of human anatomy was inspired because he saw the engineering of the human body, and appreciated the brilliance of its design. He was able to discern function from form and so rather than simply capturing an amorphous blob of body matter (what you or I might see), was able to distinguish critical structure and functional anatomy and record it in such a way that the information imparted rivals techniques and illustrations based on technology 500 years later. More than a genius, he transcended his own time by centuries, and points to a human potential that is at once shocking and exciting.
I imagine if a doctor went around digging up bodies without permission and dissecting them, he would be imprisioned even today.
Or he just cut up a lot of dead bodies to get the dimensions right.
It's not as easy as you think. Think of spaghetti code made flesh: Spaghetti nerves, spaghetti arteries, veins everywhere... And then there are the variations. No two bodies are wired exactly the same, especially after they've been cut open. Even with modern references and anatomy books, it takes a lot of studying to make sense of a cadaver.
The summary exaggerates a bit by implying we can still learn anatomy from Leonardo's sketches. Sure, they're prettier than the sketches adorning the walls of my dorm room (I'm a medical student) but they're nowhere near as accurate as, say, Netter's Atlas of Human Anatomy. Leonardo had a lot of systems wrong, especially where female anatomy was concerned. His work was amazing for its time, but we've done much better since then.
My absolutely uneducated guess is that people were more used to disgusting smells and sights in those days. People would slaughter, skin and butcher their own animals. Meat was stored for a long time. People shat everywhere. People didn't know how diseases were transmitted.
So I think it wasn't as gross to him as it is to us.