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 Chinæ," 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 explained the discrepancy by saying that the wearing of narrow garments by the moderns had straightened the limbs.

Through these attacks, however, the writings of Vesalius fell into somewhat bad odour in the court; for in that very superstitious age there was a kind of vague dread felt of reading the works of a man against whom such serious charges of arrogance and impiety were brought. And so it came about that when he received the summons to take up his residence permanently at Madrid, and the orthodoxy of the day seemed for the moment to triumph, in a fit of proud indignation, he burned all his manuscripts; destroying a huge volume of annotations upon Galen; a whole book of medical formulæ; many original notes on drugs; the copy of Galen from which he lectured, and which was covered with marginal notes of new observations that had occurred to him while demonstrating; and the paraphrases of the books of Rhases, in which the knowledge of the Arabian was collated with that of the Greeks and others. The produce of the labour of many years was thus reduced to ashes in a short fit of passion, and from this time Vesalius lived no more for controversy or study. He gave himself up to pleasure and the pursuit of wealth, resting on his reputation and degenerating into a mere

courtier. As a practitioner he was held in high esteem. When the life of Don Carlos, Philip's son, was despaired of, it was Vesalius who was called in, and who, seeing that the surgeons had bound up the wound in the head so tightly that an abscess had formed, promptly brought relief to the patient by cutting into the pericranium. The cure of the prince, however, was attributed by the court to the intercession of St. Diego, and it is possible that on the subject of this alleged miraculous recovery Vesalius may have expressed his opinion rather more strongly than it was safe for a Netherlander to do. At any rate, the priests always looked upon him with dislike and suspicion, and at length they and the other enemies of the great anatomist had their revenge.

A young Spanish nobleman had died, and Vesalius, who had attended him, obtained permission to ascertain, if possible, by a post-mortem examination, the cause of death. On opening the body, the heart was said-by the bystanders-to beat; and a charge, not merely of murder, but of impiety also, was brought against Vesalius. It was hoped by his persecutors that the latter charge would be brought before the Inquisition, and result in more rigorous punishment than any that would be inflicted by the judges of the common law. Spain, however, interfered and saved him, that he should make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Accordingly he set out from Madrid for Venice, and

The King of

on condition.

thence to Cyprus, from which place he went on to Jerusalem, and was returning, not to Madrid, but to Padua, where the professorship of physic had been offered him, when he suffered shipwreck on the island of Zante, and there perished miserably of hunger and grief, on October 15, 1564, before he had reached the age of fifty. His body was found by a travelling goldsmith, who recognized, notwithstanding their starved outlines, the features of the renowned anatomist, and respectfully buried his remains and raised a statue to his memory.

Two of the works of this great man have been already referred to, namely: "De corporis Humani Fabrica;" "De usu Radicis China." Besides these the following have appeared : "Examen Observationum Gabrielis Fallopii; ""Gabrielis Cunei Examen, Apologia Francisci Putei pro Galeno in Anatome; a great work on Surgery in seven books.

With respect to the last of these, it may be sufficient to remark that there is every reason to believe that the name of the famous anatomist was stolen after his death to give value to the production, which was compiled and published by a Venetian named Bogarucci; and that Vesalius is not responsible for the contents.

The other works are undoubtedly genuine. In 1562 Andreas seems to have been roused for a short time from the lethargy into which he had sunk, by an attack

from Franciscus Puteus; for to this attack a reply appeared-from a writer calling himself Gabriel Cuneuswhich has always been attributed by the most competent authorities to Vesalius himself. In this rather long work, covering as it does more than fifty pages in the folio edition, the views of Vesalius, which are at variance with Galen, are gone through seriatim and defended.

In 1561 Fallopius, who had studied under Vesalius, published his "Anatomical Observations," containing several points in which he had extended the knowledge of anatomy beyond the limits reached by his master. He had taught publicly for thirteen years at Ferrara, and had presided for eight years over an anatomical school, so that he was no novice in the field of biology. Yet so completely had Vesalius lost the philosophic temperament that he regarded this publication as an infringement of his rights, and in this spirit wrote an "Examen Observationum Fallopii," in which he decried the friend who had made improvements on himself, as he had been decried for his improvements on Galen. The manuscript of this work, finished at the end of December, 1561, was committed by the author to the care of Paulus Teupulus of Venice, orator to the King of Spain, who was to give it to Fallopius. The orator, however, did not reach Padua until after the death of Fallopius, and he consequently retained the document until Vesalius, on his way to Jerusalem, took possession