n the "Almansor" of Rhazes, in
1537.

(20) M. Roth: Andreas Vesalius Bruxellensis, Berlin, 1892. An
excellent account of Vesalius and his contemporaries is given by
James Moores Ball in his superbly printed Andreas Vesalius, the
Reformer of Anatomy, St. Louis, 1910.

Finding it difficult, either in Paris or Louvain, to pursue his
anatomical studies, he decided to go to Italy where, at Venice and
Padua, the opportunities were greater. At Venice, he attended the
practice of a hospital (now a barracks) which was in charge of the
Theatiner Order. I show you a photograph of the building taken last
year. And here a strange destiny brought two men together. In 1537,
another pilgrim was working in Venice waiting to be joined by his six
disciples. After long years of probation, Ignatius Loyola was ready to
start on the conquest of a very different world. Devoted to the sick
and to the poor, he attached himself to the Theatiner Order, and in the
wards of the hospital and the quadrangle, the fiery, dark-eyed, little
Basque must frequently have come into contact with the sturdy young
Belgian, busy with his clinical studies and his anatomy. Both were to
achieve phenomenal success--the one in a few years to revolutionize
anatomy, the other within twenty years to be the controller of
universities, the counsellor of kings, and the founder of the most
famous order in the Roman Catholic Church. It was in this hospital that
Vesalius made observations on the China-root, on which he published a
monograph in 1546. The Paduan School was close to Venice and associated
with it, so that the young student had probably many opportunities of
going to and fro. On the sixth of December, 1537, before he had reached
his twenty-fourth year and shortly after taking his degree, he was
elected to the chair of surgery and anatomy at Padua.

The task Vesalius set himself to accomplish was to give an accurate
description of all the parts of the human body, with proper
illustrations. He must have had abundant material, more, probably, than
any teacher before him had ever had at his disposal. We do not know
where he conducted his dissections, as the old amphitheatre has
disappeared, but it must have been very different from the tiny one
put up by his successor, Fabricius, in 1594. Possibly it was only a
temporary building, for he says in the second edition of the "Fabrica"
that he had a splendid lecture theatre which accommodated more th