furnished in the latter is
minute and accurate, and stated in well-polished Latin. As the author
proceeds, he finds it necessary to disagree with Galen, and the reasons
for this disagreement are given. The inevitable result follows that
Vesalius is placed at issue not only with "the divine man," but also
with all those who for thirteen centuries had unquestioningly followed
him. Such a result Vesalius must have foreseen. It was not, therefore, a
great surprise to him, perhaps, to receive, soon after the publication
of his work, a violent onslaught from his old master Sylvius. He simply
replied to it by a letter full of respect and friendly feeling,
inquiring wherein he had been guilty of error. The answer he got was
that he must show proper respect for Galen, if he wished to be regarded
as a friend of Sylvius.

In 1546, three years after the publication of his great work, Andreas
was summoned to Ratisbon to exercise his skill upon the emperor, and
from that date he was ranked among the court physicians. In the same
year, 1546, in a long letter, entitled "De usu Radicis Chinae," he not
only treats of the medicine by which the emperor's health had been
restored, but he vindicates his teaching against his assailants, and
again gives cumulative proof of the fact that Galen had dissected only
brutes.

It was the practice of Vesalius, while he was professor in Italy, to
issue a public notice the day before each demonstration, stating the
time at which it would take place, and inviting all who decried his
errors to attend and make their own dissections from his subject, and
confound him openly. It does not appear that any one was rash enough
ever to accept the challenge; yet, although the majority of the young
men were on the side of Vesalius, the older teachers continued to regard
him as a heretic, and in 1551 Sylvius published a bitterly personal
attack. It was nothing to him that the results of actual dissection were
against him--he even went so far as to assert that the men of his time
were constructed somewhat differently to those of the time of Galen!
Thus, to the proof that Vesalius gave that the carpal bones were not
absolutely without marrow, as Galen had asserted, Sylvius replied that
the bones were harder and more solid among the ancients, and were, in
consequence, destitute of medullary substance. Again, when Vesalius
showed that Galen was wrong in describing the human femur and humerus as
greatly curved, Sylvius