My Favourite Anatomist

Although I know relatively little about him, my favourite anatomist has got to be Philip Verheyen (1648-1711). It was he who named the Achilles tendon. A careful look at the picture below will reveal that the leg being dissected on the table is a left leg and that Verheyen has only one (right) leg under the table. Verheyen named the tendon in 1693 after having dissected his own amputated leg which was removed some years before as a result of a potentially life-threatening infection. (It was not named in antiquity after Achilles as is sometimes assumed.)