16 Vesalms: [lect. 



Medici of Florence would willingly have detained him as professor 

 in the University which he was nursing. But such tokens of 

 encouragement and others like them weighed before him little 

 when compared with the bigoted opposition of so many of his 

 brethren. The spirit shewn by the latter entered like iron into 

 his soul. If the work on which he had laboured so long and 

 which he felt to be so full of promise met with such a reception, 

 why should he continue to labour ? Why should he go on 

 casting his pearls before swine ? He had by him manuscripts 

 of various kinds, the embodiment of observations and thoughts 

 not included in the Fabrica. What they were we can only 

 guess ; what the world lost in their loss we shall never know. 

 In a fit of passion he burnt them all, and the Emperor 

 Charles V., offering him the post of Court Physician, he shook 

 from his feet in 1544 the dust of the city in whose University he 

 had done so much, and still a youth who had not yet attained 

 the thirties ended a career of science so gloriously begun. 



Ended a career ; for though in the years which followed he 

 from time to time produced something, and in 1555 brought 

 out a new T edition of his Fabrica, differing chiefly from the first 

 one, so far as the circulation of the blood is concerned, in its 

 bolder enunciation of his doubts about the Galenic doctrines 

 touching the heart, he made no further solid addition to the 

 advancement of knowledge. Henceforward his life was that 

 of a Court Physician much sought after and much esteemed, 

 a life lucrative and honourable and in many ways useful, 

 but not a life conducive to original inquiry and thought. 

 The change was a great and a strange one. At Padua he had 

 lived amid dissections ; not content with the public dissections 

 in the theatre, he took parts at least of corpses to his own 

 lodgings and continued his labours there. No wonder that he 

 makes in his Fabrica some biting remarks to the effect that he 

 who espouses science must not marry a wife, he cannot be true 

 to both. A year after his arrival at the Court he sealed his 

 divorce from science by marrying a wife ; no more dissections 

 at home, no more dissections indeed at all, at most some few 

 post-mortem examinations of patients whose lives his skill 

 had failed to save. Henceforward his days were to be spent in 



