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That is Andreas Vesalius, of Brussels, dreaded and hated by the doctors of the old school suspect, moreover, it would seem to inquisitors and theologians, possibly to Alva himself; for he has dared to dissect human bodies; he has insulted the mediaevalists at Paris, Padua, Bologna, Pisa, Venice, in open theatre; he has turned the heads of all the young surgeons in Italy and France; he has written a great book, with prints in it, designed, some say, by Titian they were actually done by another Netherlander, John of Calcar, near Cleves in which he has dared to prove that Galen's anatomy was at fault throughout, and that he had been describing a monkey's inside when he had pretended to be describing a man's; and thus, by impudence and quackery, he has wormed himself this Netherlander, a heretic at heart, as all Netherlanders are, to God as well as to Galen into the confidence of the late Emperor Charles V., and gone campaigning with him as one of his physicians, anatomising human bodies even on the battle-field, and defacing the likeness of Deity; and worse than that, the most religious King Philip is deceived by him likewise, and keeps him in Madrid in wealth and honour; and now, in the prince's extreme danger, the king has actually sent for him, and bidden him try his skill a man who knows nothing save about bones and muscles and the outside of the body, and is unworthy the name of a true physician.
Vesalius had answered him hastily and angrily, quoting his anatomy from memory; for, as he himself complained, he could not in Spain obtain a subject for dissection; not even, he said, a single skull. He had sent his book to Venice to be published, and had heard, seemingly, nothing of it.
I must show that I have since repented more than once of my impatience, and regretted that I did not take the advice of the friends who were then with me." There is no such pathetic tragedy in the history of our profession. Before the age of thirty Vesalius had effected a revolution in anatomy; he became the valued physician of the greatest court of Europe; but call no man happy till he is dead!
No wonder the medical fogies in Middlemarch are jealous, when some of the greatest doctors living were fierce upon Vesalius because they had believed in Galen, and he showed that Galen was wrong. They called him a liar and a poisonous monster. But the facts of the human frame were on his side; and so he got the better of them."
Vesalius, who made the school the most famous anatomical centre in Europe, was succeeded by Fallopius, one of the best-known names in anatomy, at whose death an unsuccessful attempt was made to get Vesalius back. In 1594, in the thirtieth year of his professoriate, he built at his own expense a new anatomical amphitheatre, which still exists in the university buildings.
At the time he came into the field medicine was struggling against the dominating Galenic teachings and the theories of Paracelsus, but perhaps most of all against the superstitions of the time. In France human dissections were attended with such dangers that the young Vesalius transferred his field of labors to Italy, where such investigations were covertly permitted, if not openly countenanced.
Galenism, of course, had to withstand the great new discoveries in anatomy and physiology made by Vesalius, Aselli, Sanctonius, Harvey, and others, not to mention the host of great investigators who were more strictly contemporaries of Boyle. Galenism also faced the rivalry of chemistry.
We do not know where he conducted his dissections, as the old amphitheatre has disappeared, but it must have been very different from the tiny one put up by his successor, Fabricius, in 1594. With Vesalius disappeared the old didactic method of teaching anatomy.
Be this as it may, one cannot but suspect some strain of truth in the story about the Inquisition; for, whether or not Vesalius operated on Don Carlos, he had seen with his own eyes that miraculous Virgin of Atocha at the bed's foot of the prince.
The Arabs gave laws in various branches of knowledge to those whom their arms had invaded, or the terror of their spreading dominion had reached, and the point from which they started was, as Humboldt acknowledges, "the study of medicine, by which they long ruled the Christian Schools," and to which they added the department of chemical pharmacy. Look at Vesalius, the contemporary of Luther.
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