28 BIOLOGY AND ITS MAKERS 
in Belgium, he went back to Louvain without obtaining his 
medical degree. After a short experience as surgeon on the 
field of battle, he went to Padua, whither he was attracted 
by reports of the opportunities for practical dissection that 
he so much desired to undertake. There his talents were 
recognized, and just after receiving his degree of Doctor of 
Medicine in 1537, he was given a post in surgery, with the 
care of anatomy, in the university. 
His Reform of the Teaching of Anatomy.—The sympa- 
thetic and graphic description of this period of his career by 
Sir Michael Foster is so good that J can not refrain from 
quoting it: ‘He at once began to teach anatomy in his own 
new way. Not to unskilled, ignorant barbers would he en- 
trust 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 the structures 
which day by day were becoming more clear to him. Fol- 
lowing venerated customs, he began his academic labors 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 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 
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 emol- 
uments. 
“Five years he thus spent in untiring labors at Padua. 
