"Kusukawa’s vivid reconstruction of the making of Vesalius's Fabrica takes us deep inside the world of anatomical demonstrations, hospital postmortems, criminal executions, university lecture halls, humanist libraries and artistic and printing workshops. She explains how Vesalius thought about books, images and bodies, and his skill at instructing Renaissance readers how to look, touch, dissect and model the human body in order to learn from it. There is no better introduction to Vesalius."

Paula Findlen, Stanford University

"In this brilliant digestion of her earlier work, Kusukawa not only reconstructs ‘the making’ of Andreas Vesalius’s masterpiece, Fabrica (and the book’s reception and afterlife), but the making of the man himself. The ‘founder’ of modern anatomy we see in full context, reliant on his peers, his readers and his students in the production of his masterpiece. He is also shown to be a canny negotiator with artists and printers in the making of the book’s famous images. Ultimately Andreas Vesalius: Anatomy and the World of Books compels engagement with the construction of the ‘truthfulness’ of all scientific images, then and now. This is historical anatomy and provocation at its arresting best."

Claudia Stein, University of Warwick