us's ancestry. The family
tradition of having one of its members as physician to the Court of
the German Emperor was four generations old when Vesalius accepted the
position.

Vesalius's great-grandfather occupied the position of
physician-in-ordinary to Marie of Burgundy, the wife of the German
Emperor Maximilian I., the distinguished patron of letters in the
Renaissance period. He lived to an advanced age as a professor of
medicine at Louvain. {110} From this time on Vesalius's family always
continued in official medical relation to the Austrian-Burgundy ruling
family. His grandfather took his father's place as physician to Mary
of Burgundy, and wrote a series of commentaries on the aphorisms of
Hippocrates. Vesalius's father was the physician and apothecary to
Charles V. for a while, and accompanied the Emperor on journeys and
campaigns. What more natural than that his son, having reached the
distinction of being the greatest medical scientist alive, should be
offered, and as a matter of course accept the post of imperial
physician!

The simple facts of the matter are that Vesalius came down into Italy
in order to study anatomy, because in that priest-ridden and
ecclesiastically-ruled country he could get better opportunities for
anatomical study and investigation than anywhere else in Europe. He
spent ten years there and then wrote his classical work on anatomy.
After that he spent some years applying anatomy to medicine. Then when
he had come to be the acknowledged leader of the medical profession of
the world, the Emperor Charles V., at that time the greatest ruler in
Europe, asked him to become his court physician. Vesalius accepted, as
would any other medical investigator that I have ever known, under the
same circumstances. His position with Charles V. gave him
opportunities to act as consultant for many of the most important
personages of Europe, and it must not be forgotten that when the King
of France was injured in a tournament Vesalius was summoned all the
way from Madrid, and gave a bad prognosis in the case.

In the light of this simple story of Vesalius's life in Italy, and of
the reasons for his going there and his departure, it is intensely
amusing to read the accounts of {111} this portion of Vesalius's life,
written by those who must maintain at all costs the historical
tradition that the Church was opposed to anatomy, that the Popes had
forbidden dissection, and that the ecclesiastical authorit