for instituting the prosecution. If
this were true, no more proof would be needed that the Inquisition was
a civil and not a religious institution, since after all the killing
of a man by a premature autopsy is a plain case of homicide.

The fact of the matter seems to be that Vesalius, who had not been
very well in the unsuitable climate of Madrid, made the trip to the
Holy Land, partly for reasons of health, but partly also for reasons
of piety. While returning he was shipwrecked on the island of Zante
and died from exposure. Vesalius had been born in Brabant, at that
time one of the most faithful Catholic countries in Europe. Like most
of the other great men of his time, the reformation utterly failed to
tempt him from his adhesion to the Catholic Church. His greatest
colleagues in anatomy and in medicine were Italians, most of whom were
in intimate relations with the Catholic ecclesiastics of the time and
continued this intimacy in spite of the disturbing influences that
were abroad. Many of these men will be mentioned in our account of the
Papal Medical School and of the Papal Physicians during the next two
or three centuries. The distinguished anatomists and physicians of
France in Vesalius's time were quite as faithful Catholics as he was.
Even Paracelsus, the Swiss, whose thorough-going independence of mind
would, it might naturally seem, have tempted him to take up with the
reformed doctrines, had no sympathy with them at all. He recognized
the abuses in the Church, but said that Luther and the so-called
reformers were doing much more harm {119} than good, and that until
they were gotten rid of no improvement in ecclesiastical matters could
be looked for. When Paracelsus came to die he left his money mainly to
the Shrine of the Blessed Virgin in his native town of Einsiedeln and
for masses for his soul. Since their time most of the distinguished
medical scientists have been quite as faithful in their Catholicity as
these two great medical colleagues of the Renaissance period. While
medicine is supposed to be unorthodox in its tendencies, the really
great thinkers in medicine, the men to whose names important
discoveries in the science were attached, were not only faithful
believers in the doctrines of Christianity, but were much more often
than has been thought even devout Catholics.

At the death of Vesalius the Golden Age of the development of anatomy
was not at its close, but was just beginning. Eustachius