Leonardo Dissects a Hundred-Year-Old Man

1503

In a Florence hospital, Leonardo da Vinci performed an autopsy on an old man who had died peacefully and discovered that his arteries were thickened and narrow. Leonardo's red-chalk drawings, four centuries before modern medicine, sketched the first anatomical account of atherosclerosis in history. His comparison with a child's organs constituted the first systematic study of age-related anatomical changes in medical history.