e to distinction, to accept the professorship of anatomy there.

Vesalius was still alive at this time, and the period when, if we
would credit certain historians who emphasize the opposition between
the Church and science, it was dangerous to dissect human bodies had
not yet passed. It is interesting to read the account of Columbus's
reception in Rome, and the interest manifested in his work by all
classes in the Roman University at this time. His course in anatomy
was so enthusiastically {233} attended that, as he himself tells in a
letter to a friend, he often had several hundred persons in his
audience when he gave his anatomical demonstrations on the cadaver.
These were not all medical students, but many of them were
ecclesiastics, and some of them important members of the hierarchy.
Even cardinals manifested their interest in anatomy, and occasionally
attended the public dissections--public, that is, as far as the
University is concerned--which were made by Columbus.

Columbus's enthusiasm for anatomy was such that, as Dr. Fisher said of
him in the Annals of Anatomy and Surgery, Brooklyn, 1878-1880, "he
dissected an extraordinary number of human bodies, and so devoted
himself to the solution of problems in anatomy and physiology that he
has been most aptly styled the Claude Bernard of the sixteenth
century." In one year, for instance, he is said to have dissected no
less than fourteen bodies, demonstrating, as Dr. Fisher has said, that
"it was an age of remarkable tolerance for scientific investigation."

Besides being an investigator, Columbus was a great teacher, and many
of our modern methods of instruction in medical schools had their
origin in the system of demonstrations introduced by him. His
descriptions of the demonstrations for students upon living animals,
show that some of the most recent ideas in medical teaching were
anticipated by this Roman professor of anatomy and medicine in the
Renaissance period. His demonstrations of the heart and blood-vessels
and of the actions of the lungs are particularly complete, and must
have given his students a very practical working knowledge of these
important physiological functions. In a word, the medical teaching of
the Roman {234} University, under him at this time, far from being
merely theoretic and distant from actual experience and demonstration,
was thoroughly modern in its methods.

It is no wonder, then, that practically all the ecclesiastical
visitor