On July 30, 2021, the third Neu-Whitrow Prize is awarded to Dániel Margócsy, Mark Somos and Stephen N. Joffe for The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius, a printed bibliography of all the known surviving exemplars of the 1543 and 1555 editions of Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica, the two authorized editions of the foundational work of the Western anatomical tradition.

Here is more from the abstract for this extraordinary project:

The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius (Leiden: Brill, 2018) is a printed bibliography of all the known surviving exemplars of the 1543 and 1555 editions of Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica, the two authorized editions of the foundational work of the Western anatomical tradition. The bibliography provides extensive descriptions of over seven hundred exemplars of these editions, including details on the physical condition, the binding, the available provenance records, the marginal annotations, and the marks of censorship present in each volume. In addition, The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius also provides a detailed, scholarly analysis of the reception of the Fabrica based on qualitative and quantitative studies of the entries in the bibliography. A website is maintained to provide updates to the census.

Please see the website of the project here: https://www.vesaliuscensus.com/digital-fabricas.

About the project co-authors:

Dániel Margócsy is reader in the history of science, technology and medicine at the University of Cambridge. He has published Commercial Visions: Science, Trade and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and, with Mark Somos and Stephen N. Joffe, The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Brill, 2018). His current work includes a forthcoming special issue titled From Hansa to Lufthansa: Transportation Technologies and the Mobility of Knowledge (co-edited with Mary Brazelton for History of Science); a project on horses, stables and cabinets of curiosity in early modern German courts; and a planned monograph on the practices of ship repair at Dutch and English colonial ports in the early modern period.

Mark Somos holds the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’s Heisenberg position at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. Mark studied history, political science and law at Cambridge, Harvard, Sussex and Leiden. He wrote Secularisation and the Leiden Circle (Brill, 2011), American States of Nature: The Origins of Independence, 1761–1775 (Oxford, 2019) and over 40 scholarly papers; and co-wrote, with Dániel Margócsy and Stephen Joffe, The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius (Brill, 2018). Mark is co-editor-in-chief of Grotiana and the History of European Political and Constitutional Thought book series.

Stephen Joffe, visiting professor in history of medicine at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles and esteemed professor of surgery and medicine at University of Cincinnati Medical Center and previously a full-time professor of surgery and medicine and divisional director of gastro-intestinal and endocrine surgery. He held faculty appointments at the Universities of London, Glasgow and Cincinnati (Ohio) with fellowships of American College of Surgeons and Royal Colleges of Surgeons of Edinburgh and Glasgow and South African College of Surgeons. He has published over 190 articles in peer reviewed journals, 40 chapters for books, editor of nine books on laser application to medicine and two books on Andreas Vesalius.

About the Neu-Whitrow Prize:

The Neu-Whitrow prize is named for John Neu who edited the ISIS bibliography and continued the work of editing the ISIS Cumulative Bibliography of which Magda Whitrow during the 1970s and 1980s produced the first five volumes. The contents of these volumes are now available digitally from the History of Science Society website which illustrates one of the major transformations in the subject brought about by modern technology.

The announcement for this 2021 Neu-Whitrow Prize can be found here:

https://cbd-histsci.org/prizes/2021-neu-whitrow-prize-announced/