1 1 His Forerunners and Followers. 9 



works of the two young men who crossed each other's path at 

 Venice in the year of our Lord 1537. 



The brilliant talents of the young Belgian at once attracted 

 the notice of the far-sighted rulers of Venice. He was in 

 December of that same year, 1 537, made Doctor of Medicine in 

 their University of Padua, was immediately entrusted with the 

 duty of conducting public dissections, and either then or very 

 shortly afterwards, though he was but a lad of some one or two 

 and twenty summers, was placed in a chair of Surgery with care 

 of Anatomy. 



He at once began to teach anatomy in his own new way. 

 Not to unskilled ignorant barbers would he entrust the task of 

 laying bare before the students the secrets of the human frame; 

 his own hand, and his own hand alone, was cunning enough to 

 track out the pattern of structures which day by day were 

 becoming more and more clear to him. Following venerated 

 customs he began his academic labours by 'reading' Galen, as 

 others had done before him, using his dissections to illustrate 

 what Galen had said. But time after time the body on the 

 table said plainly something different from that which Galen 

 had written. 



He tried to do what others had done before him, he tried to 

 believe Galen rather than his own eyes, but his eyes were too 

 strong for him ; and in the end he cast Galen and his writings 

 to the winds and taught only what he himself had seen and 

 what he could make his students see too. 



Thus he brought into anatomy the new spirit of the time, 

 and the men of the time, the young men of the time answered 

 to the new voice. Students flocked to his lectures, his hearers 

 amounted it is said to some five hundred, and an enlightened 

 Senate recognized his worth by repeatedly raising his emolu- 

 ments. 



Such a mode of teaching laid a strain on the getting of the 

 material for teaching. Vesalius was unwearied in his search 

 for subjects to dissect. He begged all the doctors to allow him 

 to examine the bodies of their fatal cases. He ingratiated 

 himself with the judges, so that when a criminal was con- 

 demned to death they gave directions that the sentence should 



