20 Vesalius : [lect. 



success of the new method of inquiry, the method of observa- 

 tion as against interpretation ; he overthrew authority and 

 raised up experience, he put the book of nature, the true book, 

 in place of the book of Galen, and thus made free and open the 

 paths of inquiry. Others before him, as we have said, Mundinus 

 to wit and Carpi, had made like efforts, but theirs were partial 

 and unsuccessful ; Vesalius' efforts were great, complete, and 

 successful. Upon the publication of the Fabrica, the pall of 

 ' authority ' was once and for ever removed. Vesalius' results 

 were impugned, and indeed were corrected by his compeers and 

 his followers; but they were impugned and corrected by the 

 method which he had introduced. Inquirers asserted that in 

 this or that point Galen was right and Vesalius was wrong, but 

 they no longer appealed to the authority of Galen as deciding 

 the question, they appealed now to the actual things as the 

 judge between the two, as the judge of Galen as of others. 

 And even those who were Vesalius' most devoted disciples 

 never made of him a second Galen ; they never appealed to 

 him as an authority, they were content to shew on the actual 

 body that what he had said was right. 



Under a more special aspect he may be regarded as the 

 founder of physiology as well as of anatomy in as much as he 

 was the distinct forerunner of Harvey. For Harvey's great 

 exposition of the circulation of the blood did, as we shall see, 

 for physiology what Vesalius' Fabrica did for anatomy ; it first 

 rendered true progress possible. And Harvey's great work was 

 the direct outcome of Vesalius' teaching, the direct outcome 

 and yet one reached by successive steps, steps taken by men of 

 the Italian school, of which Vesalius was the founder and 

 father. 



To these we may now turn our attention. 



We have seen that even in the first edition of 1543, Vesalius 

 hinted at his doubts about the Galenic doctrine of the uses of 

 the heart and its parts, and that in the second edition of 1555 

 his doubts were more clearly outspoken. That doctrine of 

 Galen was not merely a wrong conception of a particular part 

 of physiology, it stood in the way of right conceptions of all 

 parts of physiology. Let us reflect that to-day our view of any 



