532 Vesaliiis and Don Carlos 



and false were we to consider him solely from the point of view of his anatom- 

 ical achievement. It was his ambition to master the whole of medical science. 

 His preface to the Fabrica^ is an eloquent plea for an eclecticism in the medical 

 art. He is pungent in his criticism of the sectarian disunity which characterized 

 the practice of his day. "The Art of Healing," he says, "cannot and should not 

 be disunited but belongs together so that all parts of medicine, resting upon 

 an equal footing, can be brought to bear with the cumulative force of all." 

 Anatomy is but the essential preliminary. Medical practice, especially thera- 

 peutics, was close to his heart. It was the subject of his first work, a recension 

 of the treatise of Rhazes to the King Almansor, De Singularum Corporis Par- 

 tiiim Affecluum Curaiione" and his further interest is again evident in his 

 discussion of the China Root and in those works which he destroyed.* 



There is strong evidence to suggest that preoccupation with problems of 

 practical therapeutics had provided the incentive which led to the production 

 of his master work. There was no more burning question in the whole realm of 

 therapeutics in the sixteenth century than the exact mode and place of blood- 

 letting in the treatment of disease. The literature of the contemporary period 

 is shot through with blast and counterblast. The humanistic movement had 

 to some extent cleared away the rubbish of Arabian compilations and scholas- 

 tic commentary which concealed the remnants of the classic culture and had 

 exposed how far opinion had deviated from the precepts of the Father of 

 Medicine. But even those who defended and expounded the purified classics 

 against the onslaughts of the Arabists were necessarily conditioned by prece- 

 dent scholasticism, whose bonds they could not break. Lacking the touchstone 

 of factual appeal, their learning, their width of reading, their textual criticisms 

 prove as barren as the disputations of their forbears. Every argument of their 

 therapeutic doctrine rested on the unshakable foundation of Galen's pro- 

 nouncements concerning the arrangement of the venous system. It was from 

 this salient, the most vulnerable of the Galenical anatomy, that Vesalius lodged 

 his attack. Already in 1536 he had observed in Guinter of Andernach's In- 

 stitutiones Anatomicae^ that his findings on the vena azygos would in no wise 

 jibe with those of Galen. By 1538 with the publication of the Tabulae Sex," 

 although still as yet held in thrall by Galenical authority as evidenced by his 

 illustrations of the five-lobed liver and his opinion on the constitution of the 

 sternum, sacrum and coccyx, he has begun to doubt. In his second figure of 

 the venous system he says signifying the vena azygos: "Hanc sine pari venam, 

 quae octo inferiores costas nutriere dicitur, numquam sub dextra cordis auri- 

 cula propagatam vidimus, imo ut in canibus et simiis paulo supra auriculam. 

 Quare dolore laterali ad inferiora vergente, magis quoque venae sectione, 



* These works included his annotations, a complete paraphrase on the ten books of Rhazes 

 to the Caliph Almansor, and his notes for a book on medical formulae. "Quod vero attinet 

 ad Annotationes, quae in ingens volimien excrenerant. illae cum integra in decem libras 

 Rhazes ad Almansorcm regem paraphrasi, multo diligcntius quam ilia quae in noniun librimi 

 prostat a me conscripta, & libri cuiusdam de medicamentorum formulis apparatu (in cuius 

 materiam multa meo judicio non inutilia congesseram) una die mihi interierunt . . ."" 



