A closer look
Before Netflix, the hottest ticket in 16th-century Italy was watching a rogue scientist flay a grave-robbed cadaver. For centuries, anatomy was taught by professors who read ancient Greek texts from a throne while a lowly barber-surgeon hacked at a body. Andreas Vesalius threw out the book and got his hands bloody. He designed steep, multi-tiered anatomical theaters where hundreds of medical students and wealthy nobles crammed together to watch him dismantle freshly executed criminals. His dramatic flair and relentless documentation essentially birthed modern medicine out of a morbid, blood-soaked spectator sport.
