Library is a remarkable Latin anatomical treatise of the late thirteenth
century, of English provenance, one illustration from which will suffice
to show the ignorance of the author. Mundinus of Bologna, one of the
first men in the Middle Ages to study anatomy from the subject, was
under the strong domination of the Arabians, from whom he appears to
have received a very imperfect Galenic anatomy. From this date we meet
with occasional dissections at various schools, but we have seen that in
the elaborate curriculum of the University of Padua in the middle of the
fifteenth century there was no provision for the study of the subject.
Even well into the sixteenth century dissections were not common, and
the old practice was followed of holding a professorial discourse,
while the butcher, or barber surgeon, opened the cavities of the body. A
member of a famous Basel family of physicians, Felix Plater, has left
us in his autobiography(19) details of the dissections he witnessed at
Montpellier between November 14, 1552, and January 10, 1557, only eleven
in number. How difficult it was at that time to get subjects is shown by
the risks they ran in "body-snatching" expeditions, of which he records
three.

(19) There is no work from which we can get a better idea of the
life of the sixteenth-century medical student and of the style of
education and of the degree ceremonies, etc. Cumston has given
an excellent summary of it (Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin,
1912, XXIII, 105-113).

And now came the real maker of modern anatomy. Andreas Vesalius had a
good start in life. Of a family long associated with the profession,
his father occupied the position of apothecary to Charles V, whom he
accompanied on his journeys and campaigns. Trained at Louvain, he had,
from his earliest youth, an ardent desire to dissect, and cut up mice
and rats, and even cats and dogs. To Paris, the strong school of the
period, he went in 1533, and studied under two men of great renown,
Jacob Sylvius and Guinterius. Both were strong Galenists and regarded
the Master as an infallible authority. He had as a fellow prosector,
under the latter, the unfortunate Servetus. The story of his troubles
and trials in getting bones and subjects you may read in Roth's
"Life."(20) Many interesting biographical details are also to be found
in his own writings. He returned for a time to Louvain, and here he
published his first book, a commentary o