soning in the minds of some of his contemporaries--but raises the
thought of appendicitis in mine,--and one of his rivals was blamed for
it.

[Footnote 12: Like the other distinguished physicians of this time,
John Phreas did not devote himself to medicine alone. He had a taste
for literature, and besides being an accomplished scholar he was a
poet.]

Nor did the custom for English medical students to go down to Italy to
complete their education cease with the so-called reformation. Some
two generations after Vesalius's time another distinguished
Englishman, Harvey, went down to Italy to complete the studies he had
already made and eventually to lay the foundation of that knowledge on
which he was twenty years later to construct his doctrine of the
circulation of the blood. This doctrine, however, remained merely a
theory until the distinguished Italian anatomist, Malpighi, after
another half century, demonstrated the existence of the capillaries,
the little blood vessels which connect the veins and arteries, and by
thus showing the continuity of both the blood systems, proved beyond
all doubt the certainty of the teaching that the blood does circulate.

Students came, moreover, from even the distant North of Europe to the
Italian schools of medicine during these centuries. Neil Stensen, or
as he is perhaps better known by his Latin name, Nicholas Steno, the
{97} discoverer of the duct of the parotid gland, which has been named
after him, and of many other anatomical details, especially of the
fact that the heart is a muscle, which stamp him as an original
investigator of the highest order, after having made extensive studies
in the Netherlands and in France to complete the medical education
which he had begun in his native city of Copenhagen, went down into
Italy to secure freer opportunities for original research than he
could obtain anywhere else in Europe. [Footnote 13]

[Footnote 13: It may perhaps be of interest to say that while doing
investigation in anatomy and certain other sciences allied to
medicine, Steno became a convert to the Catholic Church and after some
years became a priest. Before his ordination, however, though after
his conversion, he received the call to the chair of anatomy at
Copenhagen. He accepted this and worked for several years at the Danish
University, but was dissatisfied with the state of affairs around him
as regards religion and went back to Italy. Eventually he was made a
bishop