240 HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



neither the Arabian physicians nor the men who disputed on medical 

 theses in the schools of the Middle Ages added anything to the ana 

 tomy of Galen. In the fifteenth century, when human bodies came 

 to be dissected in the medical schools, the errors and defects of Galen 

 began to be gradually detected. At length ANDREW VESALIUS (1514 

 1564), of Brussels, a man of independent fortune, and so enthu- 

 siastic an anatomist that he would rob the gibbets and dissect the 

 bodies in his bed-room, boldly affirmed the inaccuracy of Galen's 

 knowledge of anatomy, and showed conclusively that it was wholly 

 derived from the dissection of animals. In 1543 Vesalius published 

 his " System of Human Anatomy," in which the various parts were 

 carefully and minutely described and excellently figured; and the 

 work was speedily acknowledged to be infinitely superior to all pre- 

 vious systems. The authority of Galen thus received a shock from 

 which it never afterwards recovered ; but Vesalius had to pay for his 

 triumph in the opposition and abuse of the Galenists. Nearly all the 

 physicians of the period rose up in arms to defend their oracle ; but 

 Vesalius, having the facts on his side, was able single-handed to repel 

 all attacks. 



At the time he published his celebrated work Vesalius was Professor 

 of Anatomy at the University of Padua ; and he was, it is said, the 

 first anatomist who ever received a salary. He laid the foundation of 

 the celebrity of Padua as a medical school, and for nearly two hundred 

 years students resorted to it from all parts of the world. The old pre- 

 judices against dissection prevailed in France, Germany, and Britain; 

 so that Italy was indeed the only country to which a student of medi- 

 cine who wished to acquire a knowledge of the structure of the human 

 frame could resort. Italy produced a series of great anatomists after 

 the time of Vesalius ; and even contemporary with him there were some 

 professors in Italy who advanced the science by their discoveries. 



Among the students at Padua at the opening of the seventeenth 

 century was a young Englishman named WILLIAM HARVEY (1578 

 1657). The professor of anatomy at that time was a man of some 

 celebrity, called FABRICIUS AB AQUAPENDENTE, who had, among other 

 things, discovered the valves in the blood-vessels. It was, no doubt, 

 the direction of his master's researches which turned the thoughts of 

 Harvey in a similar course, and prepared the way for one of the greatest 

 physiological discoveries ever made. It need hardly be said that this 

 discovery was that of the Circulation of the Blood. \ Harvey became 

 himself a demonstrator of anatomy in London, and taught his theory 

 to his pupils as early as 1616; but it was not till 1628 that he pub- 

 lished an account of his discovery in a tract entitled " Exertitatio Ana- 

 tomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus" ("An Anatomical 

 Dissertation on the Movements of the Heart and of the Blood in Ani- 

 mals"). As usual whenever any new discovery or doctrine is an- 

 nounced, this one was attacked by a host of antagonists, among the 



