

i] His Forerunners and Followers. 5 



to punish as a sacrilege the use of the anatomist's scalpel ; 

 and what Mundinus did was done in the face of her powerful 

 opposition. For this reason apparently Mundinus had no 

 disciples carrying on his work ; all that remained of him was 

 his book, and he became little more than a smaller and a 

 later Galen. 



Two centuries later, at the very beginning of the 16th 

 century, the power of the Church in its struggle against the 

 new light was lessening, and Jacobus Berengarius, often called 

 Carpi, from the place of his birth, a town in the state of 

 Modena, followed in Mundinus' steps with greater effect. He 

 asserts that he dissected no less than a hundred corpses, and 

 his teaching was undoubtedly to a large extent based on his 

 own direct observations. 



He too however had his struggles with the Church ; he 

 was driven to desert Bologna where he had long taught, and 

 to live in retirement if not in exile at Ferrara. Nor did he 

 succeed in wholly reforming anatomical science, or in placing 

 anatomical inquiry on its only sound basis. For when he had 

 passed away the position of Master in Anatomical Science was 

 taken by a man of a different stamp, by Jacques Du Bois, 

 Jacobus Sylvius, a native of Amiens, who in 1531 began to teach 

 anatomy at Paris, and in 1550 succeeded Vidus Vidius in the 

 Chair of Medicine at the recently established College of France. 



Sylvius, though in spite of his own attitude he added to 

 our knowledge of anatomy (we daily in the present time name 

 him when we speak of the fissure of Sylvius), was an un- 

 compromising Galenist. He trusted Galen more than he did 

 his own eyes, and in everything taught or rather preached 

 Galen. Instruction in anatomy was to him reading a chapter 

 of Galen, and though he did make use of dissections, these 

 were used as mere concrete illustrations to render easy the 

 comprehension of what he was teaching, not as tests by which 

 the truth of what he was stating might be tried. 



Sylvius, as we shall see, was Vesalius' master, as indeed the 

 master of most anatomists of the age. His influence was at 

 the time of which we are speaking predominant ; with his help 

 the past efforts of Mundinus and of Carpi were brushed aside, 



