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Vesalius may be quoted in explanation in palliation: "All these impediments I made light of; for I was too young to seek gain by my art, and I was sustained by my eager desire to learn and to promote the studies in which I shared. I say nothing of my diligence in anatomizing those who attended my lectures in Italy know how I spent three whole weeks over a single public dissection.
The plates of the muscles are remarkably good, more correct, though not better perhaps, on the whole, than some of Leonardo's. The next, in 1559, is recorded by Plater in his autobiography, who gave a public dissection during three days in the Church of St. Elizabeth. Vesalius had no idea of a general circulation.
Vesalius was well off in worldly things; somewhat fond, it is said, of good living and of luxury; inclined, it may be, to say, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," and to sink more and more into the mere worldling, unless some shock should awake him from his lethargy. And the awakening shock did come.
Vexations, and a tempest of passion, only fill his sails; as the good Luther writes, "When I am angry I can pray well, and preach well;" and if we knew the genesis of fine-strokes of eloquence, they might recall the complaisance of Sultan Amurath, who struck off some Persian heads, that his physician, Vesalius, might see the spasms in the muscles of the neck.
Observation of the hired model, utterly insufficient in itself, required to be supplemented by a thorough science of the body's mechanism. But physiology and surgery were still in their infancy; and artists could not, as they could after the teachings of Vesalius, Fallopius, and Cesalpinus, avail themselves of the science accumulated for medical purposes.
Medical science still labors in Spain under the ban of ostracism, imposed in the days when all research was impiety. The Inquisition clamored for the blood of Vesalius, who had committed the crime of a demonstration in anatomy. He was forced into a pilgrimage of expiation, and died on the way to Palestine. The Church has always looked with a jealous eye upon the inquirers, the innovators.
The picture of man sacrificing himself in the cause of religion is easily matched by a Vesalius haunting the charnel houses of Europe, and risking the most loathsome diseases in the interests of scientific research. The abiding passion for truth in a character such as that of Roger Bacon or Bruno easily matches the enthusiasm of the missionary monk.
But our "Mathematick" is one which Newton would have to go to school to learn; our "Staticks, Mechanicks, Magneticks, Chymicks, and Natural Experiments" constitute a mass of physical and chemical knowledge, a glimpse at which would compensate Galileo for the doings of a score of inquisitorial cardinals; our "Physick" and "Anatomy" have embraced such infinite varieties of being, have laid open such new worlds in time and space, have grappled, not unsuccessfully, with such complex problems, that the eyes of Vesalius and of Harvey might be dazzled by the sight of the tree that has grown out of their grain of mustard seed.
An excellent account of Vesalius and his contemporaries is given by James Moores Ball in his superbly printed Andreas Vesalius, the Reformer of Anatomy, St. Louis, 1910. Finding it difficult, either in Paris or Louvain, to pursue his anatomical studies, he decided to go to Italy where, at Venice and Padua, the opportunities were greater. I show you a photograph of the building taken last year.
It does not follow, because our young Doctor's bald spot is slower in coming than he could have wished, that he has not had time to form many sound conclusions in the calling to which he has devoted himself Vesalius, the father of modern descriptive anatomy, published his great work on that subject before he was thirty.
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