Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/572

554 set upon if they ventured upon any other than the path which the Church thought sound—the insufficient path of Aristotelian investigation.

We have seen that the weapons used against the astronomers were mainly the epithets infidel and atheist. We have also seen that the missiles used against the chemists' and physicians were the epithets "sorcerer" and "leaguer with the devil," and we have picked up on various battle-fields another effective weapon, the epithet "Mohammedan."

On the heads of the anatomists and physicians were concentrated all these missiles. The charge of atheism ripened into a proverb: "Ubi sunt tres medici, ibi sunt duo athei." Magic seemed so common a charge that many of the physicians seemed to believe it themselves. Mohammedanism and Averroism became almost synonymous with medicine, and Petrarch stigmatized Averroists as "men who deny Genesis and bark at Christ."

Not to weary you with the details of earlier struggles, I will select a great benefactor of mankind and champion of scientific truth at the period of the Revival of Learning and the Reformation—Andreas Vesalius, the founder of the modern science of anatomy. The battle waged by this man is one of the glories of our race.

The old methods were soon exhausted by his early fervor, and he sought to advance science by truly scientific means—by patient investigation and by careful recording of results.

From the outset Vesalius proved himself a master. In the search for real knowledge he braved the most terrible dangers. Before his time the dissection of the human subject was thought akin to sacrilege. Occasionally some anatomist, like Mundinus, had given some little display with such a subject; but, for purposes of investigation, such dissection was forbidden. Even such men in the early Church as