i] His Forerunners and Followers. 7 



" the viscera should be merely shewn to me and to my fellow 

 u students at one or another public dissection by wholly un- 

 ** skilled barbers, and that in the most superficial way. I had 

 " to put my own hand to the business." 



Besides listening to Sylvius, he was a pupil of Johannes 

 Guinterius (Giinther), a Swiss from Andernach, who also was 

 teaching anatomy and surgery at Paris at the time, and 

 with whom his relations seem to have been closer than with 

 Sylvius. 



Neither Sylvius, however, nor Guinterius, nor any one at 

 the time was able to supply Vesalius with that for which he 

 was obviously longing, the opportunity of dissecting thoroughly 

 the human body. Complete dissection was then well-nigh 

 impossible, the most ^that could be gained was the hurried 

 examination of some parts of the body of a patient who had 

 succumbed to disease. One part of the human body, the 

 foundation of all other parts, the skeleton, could however be 

 freely used for study. In those rude times burial was rough 

 and incomplete, and in the cemeteries bones lay scattered about 

 uncovered. In the burial-ground attached to the church of 

 the Innocents at Paris Vesalius spent many hours, studying 

 the bones ; and he also tells us how in another burial-ground, 

 on what is now 'Les Buttes Chaumont,' he and a fellow 

 student nearly left their own bones, being on one occasion 

 attacked and in great risk of being devoured by savage, hungry 

 dogs who too had come there in search of bones. By such a 

 rough, perilous study Vesalius laid the foundation of his great 

 work, a full and exact knowledge of the human skeleton. He 

 tells us how he and a fellow student were wont to try their 

 knowledge by a test which has been often used since, the 

 recognition of the individual bones by touch alone, with the 

 eyes shut. 



After three years the wars drove him back from Paris to 

 Louvain, where he continued to pursue his anatomical studies 

 with unflagging zeal. Here as at Paris he was driven to use 

 strange means to gain the material for his studies. Walking 

 one day with a friend in the outskirts of the city and coming to 

 the public gibbet, where " to the great convenience of the 



