LAUSR

A respected mentor’s ‘voice from the past’ taught me a lesson probably familiar to many of us, that when we ensure that what we publish is accurate, we enable others in the future to add to our findings in the light of new knowledge. I doubt Leonardo da Vinci was taught this premise, but it does in fact apply; even almost 500 years on, there are things we can add by observing the detail contained in his extraordinary anatomical drawings. More than 600 of Leonardo’s drawings are currently housed in the Royal Library at Windsor, including 240 illustrations of the human body that are accompanied by over 13 000 words of notes. Many of these drawings are regularly reproduced, as I did, when I recently used ‘The foetus in the womb; sketches and notes on reproduction’ (figure 1) as the cover illustration for a book ‘by gracious permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.’ Leonardo described this small chalk and ink study as ‘The infant in the womb showing the foetus in the breech position.’ It dates from circa 1511, and shows a human fetus lying inside a uterus dissected by Leonardo following surgical exposure within a cadaver. Although never published in Leonardo’s lifetime, it is probably the best known illustration of its kind, and almost certainly the first in history to correctly portray the fetus in its proper position within the womb. Contrary to common belief, human dissection was not forbidden in Leonardo’s time, but the challenge was acquiring the bodies; in this regard, Leonardo’s interest was facilitated by his association with Marcantonio della Torre, an eminent anatomist and professor at the University of Pavia, up to the time of his death in the plague of 1511. As explained by Peter Dunn in ‘Perinatal lessons from the past,’ Leonardo’s artistic skill was combined with remarkable powers of observation. Through his knowledge of perspective and experiments with techniques using crosssection, rotation and multiple angles, his sketches combine amazing accuracy and clarity. As a result, as Leonardo describes: