Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/383

 *sections of a few animals, and in occasional demonstrations—which never lasted longer than three days—of the easily accessible parts of a human cadaver. Scanty as were these sources of information, Vesalius cultivated them with the greatest zest. From time to time his teacher, DuBois, noting the interest which his pupil took in anatomy, and recognizing his fitness for imparting instruction, assigned to him the special duty of rehearsing, in the auditorium, before his fellow students, the essential facts of the day's lecture. After war had been declared between the Emperor Charles the Fifth and Francis the First, King of France, Vesalius left Paris and returned to Louvain, where he began lecturing on anatomy. These lectures constituted the very first attempt at anything like systematic instruction in anatomy that is known to have been made at that ancient university. It was while he was engaged in this work that Vesalius, in order to become the possessor of an entire human skeleton,—a thing of which he felt a very great need,—ventured to remove from the gallows, outside the city, the cadaver of a criminal. This, as Haeser declares, was an act of great boldness and full of peril.

The life of a military surgeon attached to the army of Charles the Fifth, which was the life that Vesalius led during the following year or two, was not sufficiently attractive to divert his mind seriously from his favorite study; and it is therefore not surprising that we find him, at the age of twenty-three, accepting from the Senate at Venice the appointment of the professorship of anatomy at the University of Padua. When he entered upon this new work Vesalius felt considerable uncertainty as to the correctness of the anatomy which he was then teaching, and it is therefore easy to understand why his first three lectures were based entirely upon the teachings of Galen; but, before he had finished the third one of the series, he made up his mind that he would cut loose from the anatomy of the ape and confine himself to that of the human subject, as was then being revealed to him more and more perfectly from his own dissections. The stock of knowledge which he had thus begun to accumulate, increased steadily until, after