THE WARFARE OF SCIEXCE. 



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tuUian and St. Augustine held anatomy in abhorrence.* Boniface 

 VIII. interdicted dissection as sacrilege.'^ 



Throuo-E this sacred conventionalism Yesalius broke without fear. 

 Braving ecclesiastical censure and popular fury, he studied his science 

 by the only method that coiild give useful results. Ko peril daunted 

 him. To secure the material for his investigations, he haunted gib- 

 bets and charnel-houses; in this search he risked alike the fires of the 

 Inquisition and the virus of the plague. First of all men he began to 

 place the great science of human anatomy on its solid, modern founda- 

 tions on careful examination and observation of the human body. 

 This was his first great sin, and it was soon aggravated by one con- 

 sidered even greater. 



Perhaps the most unfortunate thing that has ever been done for 

 Christianity is the tying it to forms of science which are doomed and 

 gradually sinking. Just as in the time of Roger Bacon, excellent but 

 mistaken men devoted all their energies to binding Christianity to 

 Aristotle ; just as in the time of Reuchlin and Erasmus, they insisted 

 on binding Cliristianity to Thomas Aquinas so in the time of Vesa- 

 lius, such men made every effort to link Christianity to Galen. 



The cry has been the same in all ages; it is the same which we 

 hear in this age for curbing scientific studies the cry for what is 

 called " sound learning." Whether standing for Aristotle against 

 Bacon, or Aquinas against Erasmus, or Galen against Vesalius, or 

 making mechanical Greek verses at Eton in*stead of studying the 

 handiwork of the Almighty, or reading Euripides with translations 

 instead of Lessing and Goethe in the original, the cry always is for 

 " sound learning." The idea always is that these studies are safe. 



At twenty-eight years of age Yesalius gave to the world his great 

 work on human anatomy. With it ended the old and began the 

 new. Its researches, by their thoroughness, were a triumph of sci- 

 ence ; its illustrations, by their fidelity, were a triumph of art. 



To shield himself as far as possible in the battle which he fore- 

 saw must come, Yesalius prefaced the work by a dedication to the 

 Empei'or Charles Y. In this dedicatory preface he argues for his 

 method, and against the parrot repetitions of the mediaeval text- 

 books ; he also condemns the wretched anatomical' preparations and 

 specimens made by physicians who utterly refused to advance beyond 

 the ancient master. 



The parrot-like repeaters of Galen gave battle at once. After the 



' For TertuUian and Augustine against anatomical investigation, see Blount's " Essays," 

 cited in Buckle's " Posthumous "Works," vol. ii.,"pp. 10*7, 108. The passage from St. 

 Augustine is in " Civ. Dei," xsii., p. 2i. See Abbe Migne, " Patrologia," vol. xl., p. 791. 



' For Boniface VIII. and his interdiction of dissections, see Buckle's " Posthumous 

 Works," vol. ii., p. 567. For injurious effects of this ecclesiastical hostility to anatomy 

 upon the development of art, see Woltman, "Holbein and His Time," pp. 266, 267. For 

 an excellent statement of the true relation of the medical profession to religious ques- 

 tions, see Prof. Acland, "General Relations of Medicine in Modern Times," Oxford, 1868. 



