Suorum de humani corporis fabrica librorum epitome.

Shortly after publishing his encyclopedic De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, Vesalius issued De humani corporis fabrica epitome, also from the press of Johannes Oporinus of Basel. This thin set of 14 unnumbered leaves, each containing images and text, and published in large folio format even larger than the Fabrica, was an outline, or précis, or road-map of essential information contained in the Fabrica, including some different and spectacular larger images. This was the first time that the author of a revolutionary medical or scientific work issued a condensation of his essential information roughly simultaneously with the main publication. Vesalius suggested that the large sheets of the Epitome might be mounted on the walls of dissection rooms as a guide to dissection. While the Fabrica was a very expensive encyclopedic work, Vesalius' Epitome, though larger in format, was a much less expensive work that presented essential anatomical information in a concise, comparatively easy to understand manner. It became far more widely published and distributed than the Fabrica. By August 9, 1543 Vesalius published a German translation of the Epitome in Basel, and many plagiarisms and adaptations of the Epitome were published in various European countries, in a wide variety of formats, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Because of its much wider publication and distribution, even more than the Fabrica, Vesalius' Epitome was the publication that revolutionized the teaching and study of human anatomy. English translation by L. R. Lind (1949). Translated into French as Résumé de ses livres sur la fabrique du corps humain....Texte et traduction en français par Jacqueline Vons. Introduction, notes et commentaire par Jacqueline Vons et Stéphane Velut (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2008).