Medical insights
> Monash Malaysia Medical Lecture Series speaker reveals Leonardo’s other ‘skill’
LEONARDO da Vinci was not only an artist, but an anatomist. And it was his concepts that led to the development of Computerised Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanning said Warwick Medical School Professor Emeritus of Clinical Anatomy, Prof Peter Abrahams, during the first Monash Malaysia Medical Lecture Series.
With no education, except as an artist, Leonardo was still a brilliant anatomist. Says Abrahams, there were no anatomy textbooks when Leonardo came up with drawings on anatomy. He dissected more than 30 human corpses and recorded his findings in drawings.
His ability to draw what he saw accurately plus his knowledge of mechanics, gave him clarity on how the body works.
Leonardo had planned on publishing his drawings on anatomy, but his papers remained unpublished when he died in 1519.
Presenting 30 of the artist’s finest “sheets” of studies on display in Edinburg, Abrahams stated: “All these beautiful pictures didn’t come to light until 1700. Why? Because they are all owned by the Queen of England!”
Abrahams shared that when Leonardo died, he left 5,000 sheets of his papers with his assistant, Francesco Melzi who organised the unbound papers, including 300 anatomy sheets, and bound these into a leather portfolio. Fifteen years later, an Englishman bought them and gave them to King Charles II. The folio was kept on a shelf in Windsor Castle and remained there for 300 years before it was discovered. Had Leonardo published his drawings on anatomy before his demise, he would have advanced scientific knowledge of the human body even before the 20th century.
In all, Leonardo had produced hundreds of pages illustrating organs, bones and muscles. He was fascinated by the challenge of depicting a complex, layered, three-dimensional and mobile structure – the human body – in a static two-dimensional image, and devised many unique illustrative techniques to achieve his aims. Many of his drawings from the 1500s are strikingly similar to our modern medical images.
The point of Abrahams’ lecture was to show how astute, accurate and significant Leonardo’s “drawings” were and how little our knowledge of human anatomy has actually grown in 500 years.
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