obtained him for their medical school. On treating of the Papal
Medical School, we shall have more to say of him and his successor in
the professorship of anatomy and medicine as well as in the post of
Papal Physician, who was the third of the first anatomists of the
time--Eustachius. He with Columbus and Vesalius constitute the trinity
of great original investigators in anatomy about the middle of the
sixteenth century. It is extremely interesting, with the traditions
that exist in the matter, to find that the Popes secured two of these
great anatomists for their personal physicians as well as for their
medical school. The third one, Vesalius, became the body {217}
physician first to the Emperor Charles V. and then to his son Philip
II., whom many would declare to be as Catholic as the Popes themselves
in religious tendencies.

After Eustachius came Varolius, whose name is engraved in the history
of medicine because the Pons Varolii or bridge of Varolius, an
important structure in the brain now often simply called the pons, was
named after him. To Varolius we owe one of the earliest detailed
descriptions of the anatomy of the brain. He was the Papal Physician
to Gregory XIII., who will be remembered as the Pope under whom the
reform of the calendar was made by the great Jesuit mathematician and
astronomer, Father Clavius. Pope Gregory's enlightened patronage of
medicine in the person of Varolius will be better appreciated if we
add that he was chosen as Papal Physician when he was not yet thirty
years of age, though he had already given abundant evidence of his
talent for original investigation in anatomy. He died at the early age
of thirty-two, but not until after he had accomplished a life's work
sufficient to give him an enduring place in the history of anatomy.
After Varolius as Papal Physician came Piccolomini and then
Caesalpinus, whom the Italians hail as the discoverer of the
circulation of the blood before Harvey, and of whom we shall have much
to say in the next chapter. Piccolomini was not as great an original
thinker and worker as many of his predecessors and successors, but he
was a man whose prestige in medicine was scarcely less than theirs.

That this same liberal patronage of distinguished physicians was
continued in the next century may be realized from the fact that
Malpighi, the great founder of comparative anatomy, became one of the
Papal Physicians. His intimate friend, Borelli, to whom we owe th