These years were for him a continual triumph; everywhere, as he
demonstrated on the human body, students crowded his theatre, or hung
round him as he walked the streets; professors left their own
chairs--their scholars having deserted them already--to go and listen
humbly or enviously to the man who could give them what all brave souls
throughout half Europe were craving for, and craving in vain: facts. And
so, year after year, was realised that scene which stands engraved in the
frontispiece of his great book--where, in the little quaint Cinquecento
theatre, saucy scholars, reverend doctors, gay gentlemen, and even cowled
monks, are crowding the floor, peeping over each other's shoulders,
hanging on the balustrades; while in the centre, over his "subject"--which
one of those same cowled monks knew but too well--stands young Vesalius,
upright, proud, almost defiant, as one who knows himself safe in the
impregnable citadel of fact; and in his hand the little blade of steel,
destined--because wielded in obedience to the laws of nature, which are
the laws of God--to work more benefit for the human race than all the
swords which were drawn in those days, or perhaps in any other, at the
bidding of most Catholic Emperors and most Christian Kings.

Those were indeed days of triumph for Vesalius; of triumph deserved,
because earned by patient and accurate toil in a good cause: but
Vesalius, being but a mortal man, may have contracted in those same days
a temper of imperiousness and self-conceit, such as he showed afterwards
when his pupil Fallopius dared to add fresh discoveries to those of his
master. And yet, in spite of all Vesalius knew, how little he knew! How
humbling to his pride it would have been had he known then--perhaps he
does know now--that he had actually again and again walked, as it were,
round and round the true theory of the circulation of the blood, and yet
never seen it; that that discovery which, once made, is intelligible, as
far as any phenomenon is intelligible, to the merest peasant, was
reserved for another century, and for one of those Englishmen on whom
Vesalius would have looked as semi-barbarians.

To make a long story short: three years after the publication of his
famous book, 'De Corporis Humani Fabrica,' he left Venice to cure Charles
V., at Regensburg, and became one of the great Emperor's physicians.

This was the crisis of Vesalius' life. The medicine with which he had
worked the cure