10 JEKOME CARDAN. 



dieted Galen on a thousand points, to the disgust and 

 alarm of the whole body of rule of thumb physicians, 

 who, with Sylvius of Paris at their head, attacked him 

 furiously. Vesalius had studied under Sylvius, an easy- 

 going and most eminent professor of the old school, who, 

 in teaching Galen to his pupils, skipped all the hard 

 passages, and illustrated his doctrine by demonstrating 

 from limbs of dogs dissected out for him by an assistant. 

 He became so angry, that he absolutely raved at the pre- 

 sumption of Vesalius, who was not thirty years old when 

 he overthrew the ancient system by the publication of his 

 book upon the Fabric of the Human Body. Around 

 Vesalius, however, the young men of the profession 

 gathered; curiosity and admiration brought throngs to 

 his lecture-rooms, and he was sought as a star by rival 

 universities. He was Professor of Anatomy in three or 

 four Italian towns at once, giving a short winter-course 

 at each one in succession. In that way he came to 

 Pavia 1 , but although the friendship established between 

 himself and Cardan was very intimate, it seems to have been 

 maintained exclusively by written intercourse, for Cardan 

 says that, friends as they were, they never met 2 . There 



1 Details concerning Vesalius are drawn from the life prefixed by 

 Boerhaave and Albinus to his Corporis Humani Fabrica, and from his 

 own treatise De Radice China, which is full of autobiographical 

 matter. A sketch of his career, founded upon that and other authority, 

 was given (by me) in Fraser's Magazine for November, 1853. 



2 De Lib. Prop. Lib. ult. Op. Tom. i. p. 138. 



