10 Vesalius: [lect. 



be carried out at such a time, and the execution should be 

 conducted now in this manner, now in that as might best meet 

 the needs of Vesalius' public dissections. Nor did he shrink 

 apparently from robbing the grave, for he relates how, learning 

 of the death and hurried burial of the concubine of a monk, he 

 got possession of the body, and proceeded at once to remove the 

 whole of the skin in order that the peccant holy man, who had 

 got wind of the matter, might be unable to recognize his lost 

 love. And he made dissections in Bologna as well as Padua. 



Far away from the papal throne, in distant Spain, the 

 Church was all powerful, and there desecration of the corpse 

 with the knife was well-nigh impossible. In Belgium too and 

 in France opportunities for dissection were rare. But here, in 

 Venice, nearer the papal seat, the Church's hand was less heavy. 

 The high-spirited citizens of the Republic were resisting as we 

 know in many ways the Pope's demands ; and under the 

 protection of the Senate, Vesalius had opportunities for the 

 advance of knowledge which he could not have enjoyed else- 

 where. 



Five years he thus spent in untiring labours at Padua. 

 Five years he wrought, not weaving a web of fancied thought, 

 but patiently disentangling the pattern of the texture of the 

 human body, trusting to the words of no master, admitting 

 nothing but that which he himself had seen ; and at the end of 

 the five years, in 1542, while he was as yet not 28 years of age, 

 he was able to write the dedication to Charles V. of a folio 

 work, entitled the 'Structure of the Human Body,' adorned 

 with many plates and woodcuts, which appeared at Basel in the 

 following year, 1543. He had in 1538 published, under the 

 sanction of the Senate of Venice, Anatomical Tables, and in 

 the same or succeeding year had brought forth an edition of 

 Guinterius, a treatise on blood-letting, and an edition of Galen. 

 There is a legend that the pictures in the great work were by 

 the hand of Titian, but there seems no doubt that they, like 

 the Tables, were done by one John Stephen Calcar, a country- 

 man of Vesalius. 



This book is the beginning not only of modern anatomy 

 but of modern physiology. 



