he scholarly Melanchthon, himself an astronomer, thought
the book so godless that he recommended its suppression (Dannemann,
Grundriss). The church was too much involved in the Ptolemaic system to
accept any change and it was not until 1822 that the works of Copernicus
were removed from the Index.

VESALIUS

THE same year, 1542, saw a very different picture in the far-famed city
of Padua, "nursery of the arts." The central figure was a man not yet in
the prime of life, and justly full of its pride, as you may see from
his portrait. Like Aristotle and Hippocrates cradled and nurtured in an
AEsculapian family, Vesalius was from his childhood a student of nature,
and was now a wandering scholar, far from his Belgian home. But in Italy
he had found what neither Louvain nor Paris could give, freedom in
his studies and golden opportunities for research in anatomy. What an
impression he must have made on the student body at Padua may be judged
from the fact that shortly after his graduation in December, 1537,
at the age of twenty-four, he was elected to the chair of anatomy and
surgery. Two things favored him--an insatiate desire to see and handle
for himself the parts of the human frame, and an opportunity, such as
had never before been offered to the teacher, to obtain material for the
study of human anatomy. Learned with all the learning of the Grecians
and of the Arabians, Vesalius grasped, as no modern before him had done,
the cardinal fact that to know the human machine and its working, it is
necessary first to know its parts--its fabric.

To appreciate the work of this great man we must go back in a brief
review of the growth of the study of anatomy.

Among the Greeks only the Alexandrians knew human anatomy. What their
knowledge was we know at second hand, but the evidence is plain that
they knew a great deal. Galen's anatomy was first-class and was based
on the Alexandrians and on his studies of the ape and the pig. We have
already noted how much superior was his osteology to that of Mundinus.
Between the Alexandrians and the early days of the School of Salernum we
have no record of systematic dissections of the human body. It is even
doubtful if these were permitted at Salernum. Neuburger states that the
instructions of Frederick II as to dissections were merely nominal.

How atrocious was the anatomy of the early Middle Ages may be gathered
from the cuts in the works of Henri de Mondeville. In the Bodleian