When, around a century ago, the history of science emerged as a serious academic discipline, scholars were addicted to revolutions. The aim was to find the ‘revolution’ that gave birth to ‘modern’ science. Nicolaus Copernicus’s aptly named De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’), published in 1543, seemed to offer the
archetypal case study. 

And while the history of medicine received less focus, it too had its own canonical revolutionary text: De Humani Corporis Fabrica (‘On the Structure of the Human Body’) by the Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius. Vesalius raged against the anatomical errors he found in the work of the great authority of European academic medicine, Galen. The book’s beautiful illustrations appeared as visual exemplifications of the transformation he had instigated. The fact that the Fabrica was also published in 1543 only seemed to confirm that the year was a revolutionary moment.

If we are allowed to talk about progress in the history of science, it would surely consist of us having dampened – and perhaps even extinguished – much of this revolutionary fervour. It is not that anyone doubts the achievements of a Copernicus or a Vesalius. But by placing them