What do you think of when you hear the name Leonardo da Vinci – artist, inventor, Renaissance Man? But what about Leonardo as an anatomist, physiologist, cardiovascular researcher, or biomedical engineer?
Beginning around 1510, Leonardo had the opportunity to observe dissections by the great contemporary physician and anatomist, Marco Antonio Della Torre, while the latter was teaching in Pavia. Da Vinci himself stated that he participated in an additional 30 or more dissections in the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, further refining his already considerable anatomical knowledge. What seems to set him apart, however, from other artists of his time who also studied human anatomy, is that Leonardo’s curiosity extended to what lay beneath the skin and muscle, to parts of the human body that would never be directly visualized in his artistic works. He wanted to know not just what the heart, lungs, brain and other organs looked like, but how they functioned. And being Leonardo, he set himself the task of figuring it out.

Join physiologist and medical historian, Dr. Jeremy Wasser, PhD, for an introduction to the Leonardo you may not be familiar with. Leonardo da Vinci: Cardiovascular Physiologist and the First Biomedical Engineer will present the ways Leonardo’s ideas on how the body actually works were centuries ahead of his time. You will learn how Leonardo’s keen observations have been re-discovered and confirmed thanks to modern experimental methods and medical imaging techniques such as MRI.