nd in many ways useful, but not a life
conducive to original inquiry and thought. The change was a great and
a strange one. At Padua he had lived amid dissections; not content
with the public dissections in the theatre, he took parts, at least,
of corpses to his own lodgings and continued his labors there. No
wonder that he makes in his Fabrica some biting remarks to the effect
that he who espouses science must not marry a wife; he cannot be true
to both. A year after his arrival at the Court he sealed his divorce
from science by marrying a wife; no more dissections at home, no more
dissections indeed at all; at most, some few post-mortem examinations
of patients whose lives his skill had failed to save. Henceforth his
days were to be spent in courtly duties, in soothing the temporary
ailments, the repeated gouty attacks of his imperial master, in
healing the maladies of the nobles and others round his throne, and
doubtless in giving advice to more humble folk, who were from time to
time allowed to seek his aid. Whither his master went, he went too,
and we may well imagine that in leisure moments he entertained the
Emperor and {109} the Court with his intellectual talk, telling them
some of the fairy tales of that realm of science which he had left,
and of the later achievements of which news came to him, scantily,
fitfully and from afar."

Professor White has gone much farther than Sir Michael Foster. The
English physiologist knew too much about the history of medicine in
Italy even to hint at any ecclesiastical opposition with regard to
Vesalius. President White, however, has no scruples in the matter.
This makes an excellent opportunity to write the kind of history that
is to be found in his book. Apparently forgetful of the thought that
the Emperor Charles V. was not at all likely to take as his body
physician a man who had been in trouble with the ecclesiastical
authorities in Italy, he insists that the reason why Vesalius
dedicated his great work on anatomy to the Emperor Charles V. was "to
shield himself as far as possible in the battle which he foresaw must
come." Later he suggests that it was only the favor of the Emperor
saved him from the ecclesiastical authorities.

All that has been said by historians with regard to the reasons for
Vesalius's acceptance of the post of physician to the Emperor Charles
V. can only have come from men who either did not know or had for the
moment forgotten the story of Vesali