A man standing, anterior view with brain and contents of thorax and abdomen exposed. Engraving by Giulio de' Musi, by 1552, first published in 1714.

In his Opuscula anatomica (Venice 1564), Eustachius gave notice of a book he planned to publish under the title, De dissensionibus ac controversiis anatomicis for which forty-six plates had been prepared (Preface). These, as he remarks elsewhere in the book (p. 68), had been completed as early as 1552. By his death in 1574, the work still had not appeared. In the early eighteenth century, the papal physician Giovanni Maria Lancisi discovered the surviving plates with the heirs of Eustachius's collaborator, Pier Matteo Pini, and published them in 1714, supplying the missing text himself (for the titlepage vignette, see Wellcome Library catalogue no 25346i). The 1714 edition has a total of forty-seven plates, struck from the eight original plates that were published by Eustachius in the 1564 Opuscula anatomica and the additional thirty-eight plates, one of which was double-sided. In illustrated anatomy books, a standard method of referring to particular parts of the body involved labelling the image with letters, symbols and numbers. Eustachius's plates are innovatory because a grid system, with ruled lines bordering the image on three sides, is used to locate specific structures of the body. In this way, the figure remained unobscured by labelling and the reader no longer had to search the figure for the relevant lettering. Vesalius acknowledged problems of legibility with the labelling system and accordingly amended the plates in the second edition of his De humani corporis fabrica of 1555, removing shading around some of the lettering to make them clearer. The Eustachian plates are also notable because they are an early example of copper-engraved anatomical illustration, preceded by the muscle plates published by G. B. Canano in the mid-1540s and the Vesalian plates published by T. Geminus 1545. The Eustachian plates appeared in several editions after that of Lancisi of 1714, evidence of their relevance and quality despite the passage of more than a hundred and fifty years since their production