Page:The Hunterian Oration,1838.djvu/22

14 at Paris his splendid work, illustrated by the pencil of a master, "De Corporis Humani Fabric,” the first systematic treatise of anatomy. Vesalius, then in his twenty-second year, questioned the authority and corrected many of the errors of Galen. He was physician to the Emperor Charles V., and for seven years held the anatomical chair of the University of Padua. The premature and melancholy termination of his career is well known. The celebrated anatomists Fallopius and Eustachius were contemporary with Vesalius; and Fabricius ab Acquapendente, eminent also as a surgeon, was his pupil and successor in the University.

At the same period flourished, the restorer of surgery, as Vesalius of anatomy. An uneducated man, of a bold and enterprising genius, he distinguished himself at an early age in the wars of France. His first feat, while young and unknown, at a skirmish near Boulogne, toward the close of the reign of Francis I., was characteristic. He extracted a lance-head from the forehead of the Count d’Aumale, son of that king, which was so deeply infixed and buried by the swollen integument that the surgeons had pronounced the wound mortal. Paré read Galen by aid of an interpreter. His anatomy was that of Vesalius; his instruments are copied from the Greeks, and much of his surgery was derived from the Italian