nto Common Errors," speaks of these "Tractates" as requiring
to be received with caution, adding as regards Albertus that "he was a
man who much advanced these opinions by the authoritie of his name, and
delivered most conceits, with strickt enquirie into few."

As regards human anatomy, it was considered, during the Middle Ages, to
be impiety to touch with a scalpel "the dead image of God," as man's
body was called. Mundinus, the professor of medicine at Bologna from
1315 to 1318, was the first to attempt any such thing. He exhibited the
public dissection of three bodies, but by this created so great a
scandal that he gave up the practice, and contented himself with
publishing a work, "De Anatome," which formed a sort of commentary on
Galen. This work, with additions, continued to be the text-book of the
schools until the time of Vesalius, who founded the study of anatomy as
nowadays pursued.

Andreas Vesalius was born at Brussels, on the last day of the year 1514,
of a family which for several generations had been eminent for medical
attainments. He was sent as a boy to Louvain, where he spent the greater
part of his leisure in researches into the mechanism of the lower
animals. He was a born dissector, who, after careful examination, in his
early days, of rats, moles, dogs, cats, monkeys, and the like, came, in
after-life, to be dissatisfied with any less knowledge of the anatomy of
man.

He acquired great proficiency in the scholarship of the day. Indeed the
Latin, in which he afterwards wrote his great work, is so singularly
pure that one of his detractors pretended that Vesalius must have got
some good scholar to write the Latin for him. Latin was not the only
language in which he was proficient; he added Greek and Arabic to his
other accomplishments, and this for the purpose of reading the great
biological works in the languages in which they were originally written.
From Louvain the youth went to Paris, where he studied anatomy under a
most distinguished physician, Sylvius. It was the practice of that
illustrious professor to read to his class Galen on the "Use of Parts,"
omitting nearly all the sections where exact knowledge of anatomical
detail was necessary. Sometimes an attempt was made to illustrate the
lecture by the dissection of a dog, but such illustration more often
exposed the professor's ignorance than it added to the student's
knowledge. Indirectly, however, it did good, for whenever Sylvius, afte