e history of "that most learned, famous, and
rare Baron Vesalius," who had stood by and seen all these things done;
and try if we cannot, after we have learned the history of his early
life, guess at some of his probable meditations on this celebrated
clinical case; and guess also how those meditations may have affected
seriously the events of his after life.

Vesalius (as I said) was a Netherlander, born at Brussels in 1513 or
1514. His father and grandfather had been medical men of the highest
standing in a profession which then, as now, was commonly hereditary. His
real name was Wittag, an ancient family of Wesel, on the Rhine, from
which town either he or his father adopted the name of Vesalius,
according to the classicising fashion of those days. Young Vesalius was
sent to college at Louvain, where he learned rapidly. At sixteen or
seventeen he knew not only Latin, but Greek enough to correct the proofs
of Galen, and Arabic enough to become acquainted with the works of the
Mussulman physicians. He was a physicist, too, and a mathematician,
according to the knowledge of those times; but his passion--the study to
which he was destined to devote his life--was anatomy.

Little or nothing (it must be understood) had been done in anatomy since
the days of Galen of Pergamos, in the second century after Christ, and
very little even by him. Dissection was all but forbidden among the
ancients. The Egyptians, Herodotus tells us, used to pursue with stones
and curses the embalmers as soon as they had performed their unpleasant
office; and though Herophilus and Erasistratus are said to have dissected
many subjects under the protection of Ptolemy Soter in Alexandria itself:
yet the public feeling of the Greeks as well as of the Romans continued
the same as that of the ancient Egyptians; and Galen was fain--as
Vesalius proved--to supplement his ignorance of the human frame by
describing that of an ape. Dissection was equally forbidden among the
Mussulmans; and the great Arabic physicians could do no more than comment
on Galen. The same prejudice extended through the middle age. Medical
men were all clerks, clerici, and as such forbidden to shed blood. The
only dissection, as far as I am aware, made during the middle age was one
by Mundinus in 1306; and his subsequent commentaries on Galen--for he
dare allow his own eyes to see no more than Galen had seen before
him--constituted the best anatomical manual in Europe till