6.) Where did he grow up and what was his childhood like?
Andreas Vesalius was born on December 31, 1514, in Brussels. Vesalius's ancestors, moved from the German town of Wesel to Brussels in the early fifteenth century and became prominent as physicians and pharmacists. His father served as pharmacist to Margaret of Austria (1480–1530) and later to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500–1558; see entry). His great-grandfather, Johannes Wesalia, was the head of the medical school at the University of Louvain, where Vesalius started his medical studies in 1530. He enrolled at the university under the name Andres van Wesel de Bruxella.
Vesalius got transferred to the medical school of the University of Paris in 1533. Johann Guenther von Andernach, one of his two teachers ,he had a nice and pleasant personality, but was a very poor anatomist. The other teacher was Jacobus Sylvius, who left tradition by giving some part of his life to dissection(cutting/taking bodies apart) in anatomical instructions. Both teachers gave testimony of their student's anatomical expertise. Guenther published a book in 1536 that glowingly recorded Vesalius's discovery of the spermatic vessels. Sylvius on the other hand, violently disagreed with Vesalius's daring claim that Galen, the great authority in physiology since classical times, wrote on the inner organs of the body without ever seeing them.
• Due to the outbreak of war between France and Spain (a conflict called the Italian Wars; 1494–1559), Vesalius had to leave Paris in 1536. Spain was part of the Holy Roman Empire. The leader of the Holy Roman Empire was Emperor Charles V, he was also king Charles I of Spain. The HolyRoman Empire covered most of central Europe and parts of northern Europe, including the Low Countries. France was not included in the Holy Roman Empire, so citizens of the empire living in France when war broke out were required to return to their home countries. As a citizen of the Low Countries, Vesalius therefore had to go back to Louvain, Belgium. On the recommendation of Guenther, Vesalius was permitted to give public dissections while he was still a student. He also published Paraphrase of the Ninth Book of Rhazes. Rhazes, also known as al-Rasi, was a tenth-century Muslim physician. In this work Vesalius made aconsiderable effort to substitute Latin terms for the still heavily Arabic medical terminology.
•Vesalius, he was a native of the duchy of Brabant (the southern portion of which is now in Belgium),he was also from a family of physicians and pharmacists. He attended the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain) in 1529–33, and from 1533 to 1536 he studied at the medical school of the University of Paris, where he learned to dissect animals. He also had the opportunity to dissect human cadavers, and he devoted much of his time to a study of human bones, at that time easily available in the Paris cemeteries.