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 the middle of
the fifteenth century.

Then, in Italy at least, the classic Renaissance gave fresh life to
anatomy as to all other sciences. Especially did the improvements in
painting and sculpture stir men up to a closer study of the human frame.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote a treatise on muscular anatomy. The artist and
the sculptor often worked together, and realised that sketch of Michael
Angelo's in which he himself is assisting Fallopius, Vesalius's famous
pupil, to dissect. Vesalius soon found that his thirst for facts could
not be slaked by the theories of the Middle Age; so in 1530 he went off
to Montpellier, where Francis I. had just founded a medical school, and
where the ancient laws of the city allowed the faculty each year the body
of a criminal. From thence, afte