VESALIUS

1514 TO 1563

Andreas Vesalius was born on the last day of December, 1514 nearly thirteen hundred and fourteen years after the death of Galen. Imagination is staggered by the attempt to grasp in detail that mighty span of centuries; yet the meanest imagination among us could measure with a foot rule the intervening progress in science. Galen's works were text-books still. Names are named in the interval, and a few good surgical writers, Antyllus and Oribasius already noted, Ætius Amidenus, Alexander of Tralles, Paul of Ægina, - all belonging to the old order. Then there were the Arabians, Avicenna (980-1037 A.D.) and Albucasis (died about 1105 A.D.).

Those Arabians are worth noting as we pass. Medical science must generally be looked for at its best among forward and active peoples, and during the Middle Ages the Arabs were conspicuous in the world's history. Both Avicenna and Albucasis were authorities for centuries, not so much for any new thing they did as for their compiling and bringing before the medical public, such as it was, the best ancient teaching, otherwise lost or forgotten. In a way they were necessary to Vesalius.

Vesalius is a landmark in our course because he did

new and important things. He cast aside tradition and saw with his own eyes. Men say that he overthrew Galen; but in truth he was the follower of Galen in science the first man known to me, for thirteen centuries, to adopt and practice the methods of that ancient master. He improved on Galen, he corrected many of Galen's errors, he came to be a man full of novel lore; but why disparage Galen? Do not we twentieth-century students know things undreamed of by Hunter, Rush, or Drake? Vesalius is not generally reckoned among the surgeons; indeed, surgical writers pass him by and tell rather of his contemporary, Ambroise Paré, of whom we shall hear; but to-day Vesalius would properly be regarded as a surgeon. He held a chair of surgery; he was a profound student, the founder of modern anatomic research, the man who made possible for us a development of surgical science.

Fain would one dwell upon those wonderful years of the sixteenth century, when Vesalius lived and taught. We are wont to sum it all up in the word renaissance. That was the springtime of our world. Great names crowd the text-Luther, Michaelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Copernicus, Columbus, to go no farther. Men were breaking away from tradition, the dark veil of the Middle Ages had been rent. In the midst of such stirrings Constantinople fell before the militant Turk, and wise men fled from the ancient capital, bearing with them, for their Western brethren, forgotten treasures of Greek literature and science.

The story of Vesalius's life is far different from that

of the rude craftsmen who composed the surgical guild\ of his day. He was a cultivated product of the great universities, with learning as well as genius, and he came to appreciate early the importance of anatomy and its bearing upon surgery. He was born in Brussels of an excellent burgher family, established for generations at Nymwegen. His traditions were of the best, for he came from a line of physicians and learned men. His father was apothecary to Charles V. Like Hippocrates and Galen, Vesalius was carefully educated, and he spent many of his youthful years at the famous old University of Louvain, not far from home. Alas, for our lack of space! that old university life is a subject worthy of study.

The lad was born with a passion for dissecting. At Louvain he had to be satisfied with animals. Then, at eighteen, in 1533, he went to Paris to learn of Sylvius (Du Bois) that Jacobus Sylvius after whom the fissure is named.

Sylvius was no surgeon, he was not even a great anatomist. He was a lecturer who read out of Galen to his pupils sitting about, with an occasional dead body before them. Now and then, by direction of the master, the crude barber assistants exposed roughly some structures for the gaze of the audience.

This was futile work. Stories are told of Vesalius's impatience; one of them that at the third demonstration, exasperated by the ignorance displayed, he thrust aside the stupid assistants and showed with his own

"Vesalius: His Forerunners and Followers," Lecture I, in "The History of Physiology," by Sir Michael Foster, 1901.