opposition to dissection and the advancement of anatomical knowledge.
It is hard to understand, however, why men will not look at such an
incident from the standpoint of our own experience in {105} the modern
time. There are men still alive in certain states of the Union who
recall how much trouble they had to go to as medical students in order
to procure a skeleton. If we go back fifty years, nearly every
skeleton that physicians had in their offices was obtained in some way
almost as surreptitious as that just described, or was purchased
through some underhand channel. They were dug up from potter's field,
or sometimes procured from complacent prison officials, or
occasionally stolen from respectable cemeteries. In this respect
Vesalius was not much worse off than were his medical colleagues for
nearly three centuries and a half after his time in the northern
countries. It was easier to procure such material in Italy.
Vesalius had that precious quality that makes the investigator desire
to see and know things for himself. He could not get opportunities for
definite anatomical knowledge in the western part of Europe, so he
gave up his practice, though Louvain, his native town, was a most
promising place, having nearly 200,000 inhabitants and business
relations with all the world at the moment, and went down into Italy
where he knew that he could pursue his anatomical studies to his
heart's content. The tradition of the work that Zerbi and Achillini
had done, and especially what Benivieni and Berengar had accomplished
within a few decades before this time, was commonly known in all the
medical schools of Europe, and many an ardent young anatomist in the
West yearned for the opportunities and the incentive that he could
obtain down there. Church influence was predominant; the ecclesiastics
were the actual rulers of the universities, but medical science, and
above all anatomy, was being studied very ardently. Vesalius thus
prompted, {106} came and found what he looked for. At the end of ten
short years of work down there, he had completed his text-book of
anatomy which was to earn for him deservedly the title of Father of
Anatomy.
At first Vesalius seems to have spent some time in Venice, where he
attracted considerable attention by his thorough, practical anatomical
knowledge and independent mode of thinking. After only a short period
in Venice, however, he proceeded to Padua, where he spent some months
in preparation for his doctor's examination. It is known that, having
completed his examination in the early part of December, 1537, he was
allowed within a few days to begin the teaching of anatomy, and,
indeed, was given the title of professor by the university
authorities.
The next six years were spent in teaching at Padua, Bologna and Pisa,
and in fruitful investigation. Every opportunity to make dissections
was gladly seized, and Vesalius's influence enabled him to obtain a
large amount of excellent anatomical material. He began at once the
preparations for the publication of an important work on the anatomy
of the human body. This was published in 1543 at Basel, at a time when
its author was not yet thirty years of age. It is one of the classics
of anatomical literature. Even at the present day it is often
consulted by those who wish to see the illustrative details of
Vesalius's wonderful dissections as given in the magnificent plates
that the work contains. It has become one of the most precious of
medical books, and is eagerly sought for by collectors.
For ten years more Vesalius devoted himself to his favorite studies in
anatomy and physiology, for it must not be forgotten that he was
constantly applying his {107} knowledge of form and tissue to
function, and came to be looked upon as the leading medical
investigator of the world. It is apparently sometimes not realized,
however, that Vesalius was no mere laboratory or dissecting room
investigator. After the publication of his great work on anatomy he
set himself seriously to the application of what he had discovered to
practical medicine and surgery. He was an intensely practical man. As
a consequence, it was not long before consultations began to pour in
on him, and he came to be considered as one of the greatest medical
practitioners of his time. Ruling princes in Italy, visitors of
distinction, high ecclesiastics--all wished to have Vesalius's opinion
when their cases became puzzling. This is a side of his character that
many of his modern biographers have missed. Even Sir Michael Foster,
whose knowledge of the history of medicine, and especially of
physiology, makes one hesitate to disagree with him, seems not to have
appreciated Vesalius's interest in practical medicine. A laboratory
man himself, he was apparently not able to appreciate why Vesalius
should have given up his scientific research in Italy to accept the
post of Royal Physician to the Emperor Charles V.
Professor Foster thinks it necessary, then, to find some other reason
than the temptation of the importance of the position to account for
Vesalius's acceptance of it. He concludes that it was because of
discouragement in his purely scientific studies as a consequence of
the opposition of the Galenists. Opposition on the part of the old
conservative school of medicine there was, and some of it was rather
serious. This was not enough, however, to have discouraged Vesalius.
Professor Foster goes so far as to wax almost sentimental over the
{108} fact that the acceptance of the post of physician to Charles V.
ended Vesalius's scientific career; "for though in the years which
followed the Father of Anatomy from time to time produced something
original, and in 1555 brought out a new edition of his Fabrica,
differing chiefly from the first one, so far as the circulation of the
blood is concerned, in its bolder enunciation of its doubts about the
Galenic doctrines touching the heart, he made no further solid
addition to the advancement of knowledge. Henceforward his life was
that of a court physician much sought after and much esteemed--a life
lucrative and honorable and in many ways useful, but not a life
conducive to original inquiry and thought. The change was a great and
a strange one. At Padua he had lived amid dissections; not content
with the public dissections in the theatre, he took parts, at least,
of corpses to his own lodgings and continued his labors there. No
wonder that he makes in his Fabrica some biting remarks to the effect
that he who espouses science must not marry a wife; he cannot be true
to both. A year after his arrival at the Court he sealed his divorce
from science by marrying a wife; no more dissections at home, no more
dissections indeed at all; at most, some few post-mortem examinations
of patients whose lives his skill had failed to save. Henceforth his
days were to be spent in courtly duties, in soothing the temporary
ailments, the repeated gouty attacks of his imperial master, in
healing the maladies of the nobles and others round his throne, and
doubtless in giving advice to more humble folk, who were from time to
time allowed to seek his aid. Whither his master went, he went too,
and we may well imagine that in leisure moments he entertained the
Emperor and {109} the Court with his intellectual talk, telling them
some of the fairy tales of that realm of science which he had left,
and of the later achievements of which news came to him, scantily,
fitfully and from afar."
Professor White has gone much farther than Sir Michael Foster. The
English physiologist knew too much about the history of medicine in
Italy even to hint at any ecclesiastical opposition with regard to
Vesalius. President White, however, has no scruples in the matter.
This makes an excellent opportunity to write the kind of history that
is to be found in his book. Apparently forgetful of the thought that
the Emperor Charles V. was not at all likely to take as his body
physician a man who had been in trouble with the ecclesiastical
authorities in Italy, he insists that the reason why Vesalius
dedicated his great work on anatomy to the Emperor Charles V. was "to
shield himself as far as possible in the battle which he foresaw must
come." Later he suggests that it was only the favor of the Emperor
saved him from the ecclesiastical authorities.
All that has been said by historians with regard to the reasons for
Vesalius's acceptance of the post of physician to the Emperor Charles
V. can only have come from men who either did not know or had for the
moment forgotten the story of Vesalius's ancestry. The family
tradition of having one of its members as physician to the Court of
the German Emperor was four generations old when Vesalius accepted the
position.
Vesalius's great-grandfather occupied the position of
physician-in-ordinary to Marie of Burgundy, the wife of the German
Emperor Maximilian I., the distinguished patron of letters in the
Renaissance period. He lived to an advanced age as a professor of
medicine at Louvain. {110} From this time on Vesalius's family always
continued in official medical relation to the Austrian-Burgundy ruling
family. His grandfather took his father's place as physician to Mary
of Burgundy, and wrote a series of commentaries on the aphorisms of
Hippocrates. Vesalius's father was the physician and apothecary to
Charles V. for a while, and accompanied the Emperor on journeys and
campaigns. What more natural than that his son, having reached the
distinction of being the greatest medical scientist alive, should be
offered, and as a matter of course accept the post of imperial
physician!
The simple facts of the matter are that Vesalius came down into Italy
in order to study anatomy, because in that priest-ridden and
ecclesiastically-ruled country he could get better opportunities for
anatomical study and investigation than anywhere else in Europe. He
spent ten years there and then wrote his classical work on anatomy.
After that he spent some years applying anatomy to medicine. Then when
he had come to be the acknowledged leader of the medical profession of
the world, the Emperor Charles V., at that time the greatest ruler in
Europe, asked him to become his court physician. Vesalius accepted, as
would any other medical investigator that I have ever known, under the
same circumstances. His position with Charles V. gave him
opportunities to act as consultant for many of the most important
personages of Europe, and it must not be forgotten that when the King
of France was injured in a tournament Vesalius was summoned all the
way from Madrid, and gave a bad prognosis in the case.
In the light of this simple story of Vesalius's life in Italy, and of
the reasons for his going there and his departure, it is intensely
amusing to read the accounts of {111} this portion of Vesalius's life,
written by those who must maintain at all costs the historical
tradition that the Church was opposed to anatomy, that the Popes had
forbidden dissection, and that the ecclesiastical authorities were
constantly on the watch to hamper, as far as possible at least, if not
absolutely to prevent, all anatomical investigation, and were even
ready to put to death those who violated the ecclesiastical
regulations in this matter. Dr. White, for instance, has made a great
hero of Vesalius for daring to do dissection. He was only doing what
hundreds of others were doing and had been doing in Italy for hundreds
of years; but to confess this would be to admit that the Church was
not opposed to anatomy or the practice of dissection, and so perforce
Vesalius must be a hero as well as the Father of Anatomy. To read Dr.
White's paragraph in the History of the Warfare of Science with
Theology, one cannot but feel sure that Vesalius must practically have
risked death over and over again in order to pursue his favorite
practice of dissection and his original researches in anatomy. I would
be the last one in the world to wish to minimize in any way Vesalius's
merits. He was a genius, a great discoverer--above all an inspiration
to methods of study that have been most fruitful in their results, and
withal a devout Christian and firm adherent of the Roman Catholic
Church. He was not a hero in the matter of dissection, however, for
there was no necessity for heroism. Dissection had been practiced very
assiduously before his time in all the universities of Italy,
especially in Bologna, which was a Papal city from the beginning of
the sixteenth century, and also in Rome at the medical college of the
Roman University under the very eye of the Popes.
{112}
In the light of this knowledge read President White's paragraph with
regard to Vesalius:
"From the outset Vesalius proved himself a master. In the search for
real knowledge he _risked the most terrible dangers, and especially
the charge of sacrilege, founded upon the teachings of the Church
for ages._ As we have seen, even such men in the early Church as
Tertullian and St. Augustine held anatomy in abhorrence, and the
decretal of Pope Boniface VIII. was _universally construed as
forbidding all dissection, and as threatening excommunication
against those practicing it. Through this sacred conventionalism
Vesalius broke without fear; despite ecclesiastical censure,_ great
opposition in his own profession and popular fury, he studied his
science by the only method that could give useful results. No peril
daunted him. To secure material for his investigations, he haunted
gibbets and charnel-houses, _braving the fires of the Inquisition_
and the virus of the plague." (The italics are mine.)
A very interesting commentary on the expressions of Professor White
with regard to Vesalius is to be found in a paragraph of Von Toeply's
article on the History of Anatomy in the second volume of Puschmann's
History of Medicine, already quoted. "Out of the fruitful soil so well
cultivated in the two preceding centuries, there developed at the
beginning of the sixteenth century the Renaissance of anatomy, with
all the great and also with all the unpleasant features which belong
to the important works of art of that period. One has only to think of
Donatello, Mantegna, Michel Angelo, and Verochio to realize these. The
Renaissance of anatomy developed in a field of human endeavor which,
if it did not owe all, at least owed very much to the art-loving and
{113} culture-fostering rulers, Popes and cardinals of the time. Older
historians have told the story of the rise of anatomy in such a way
that it seemed that the Papal Curia had set itself ever in utter
hostility to the development of anatomy. As a matter of fact, the
Papal Court placed scarcely any hindrances in its path. On the
contrary, the Popes encouraged anatomy in every way."
In the page and a half following this quotation Von Toeply has
condensed into brief form most of what the Popes did for medicine and
the medical sciences, though more especially for anatomy, during the
centuries from the sixteenth down to the beginning of the nineteenth.
Some excerpts from this, with a running commentary, will form the best
compendium of the history of the Papal relations to medical education
and will show that they are strikingly different from what has usually
been said. Von Toeply begins with Paul III., who is known in history
more especially for his issuance of the Bull founding the Jesuits. It
might ordinarily be presumed by those who knew nothing of this Pope,
that the Head of the Church, to whom is due an institution such as the
Jesuits are supposed to be, would not be interested to the slightest
degree in modern sciences, and would be one of the last ecclesiastical
authorities from whom patronage of science could possibly be expected.
It was he, however, who founded special departments for anatomy and
botany and provided the funds for a salary for a prosector of anatomy
at Rome.
After this practically every Pope in this century has some special
benefaction for anatomy to his credit. Pope Paul IV. (1555-59) called
Columbus to Rome and gave him every opportunity for the development of
his original genius in anatomical research. Columbus had {114}
succeeded Vesalius at Padua and had been tempted from there to Pisa by
the duke who wished to create in that city a university with the most
prominent teachers in every department that there was in Italy, yet it
was from this lucrative post that Pope Paul IV. succeeded in winning
Columbus. Quite apart from what we know of Columbus's career at Rome
and his successful investigation on the cadaver of many anatomical
problems, perhaps the best evidence of the friendly relations of the
Popes to him and to his work is to be found in the fact that, first
Columbus himself, and then after his death his sons, in issuing their
father's magnificent work De Re Anatomica, dedicated it to the
successor of Pope Paul IV., the reigning Pope Pius IV. In the meantime
Cardinal Della Rovere had brought Eustachius to Rome to succeed
Columbus.
Under Sixtus V., who was Pope from 1585 to 1590, the distinguished
writer on medicine, and especially on anatomy, Piccolomini, published
his lectures on anatomy with a dedication to that Pope. It is well
known that the relations between the professor of anatomy at the Papal
Medical School and the Pope were very friendly. As was the case with
regard to Colombo or Columbus, so also with Caesalpinus. Columbus was
the first to describe the pulmonary circulation. Caesalpinus is
generally claimed by the Italians to have made the discovery of the
circulation of the blood throughout the body before Harvey. Columbus
had been at Pisa and was tempted to come to Rome. Caesalpinus had also
been at Pisa until Clement VIII. held out inducements that brought him
to Rome. Clement is the last Pope of the century, but Von Toeply
mentions five Popes in the next century who were in intimate relations
with {115} distinguished investigators into medical subjects and whose
names are in some way connected with some of the most noteworthy
teaching and writing in medical matters during the seventeenth
century.
It will be readily seen what a caricature of the life of Vesalius is
Prof. White's paragraph, if one compares it with the following
paragraph taken from so readily available an historical source as the
article on the History of Anatomy, by Prof. Turner, of Edinburgh, in
the first volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The distinguished
Scotch anatomist who so worthily filled the chair of anatomy at the
University of Edinburgh says with regard to Berengar of Carpi, who was
the professor of anatomy at Bologna thirty-five years before
Vesalius's time, that, "In the annals of medicine Berengar's name will
be remembered as one of the most zealous and eminent in cultivating
the anatomy of the human body. It was long before the anatomists of
the following age could boast of equalling him. His assiduity was
indefatigable, and he declares that he dissected above one hundred
human bodies." This should be enough, it seems to me, to settle the
question that anatomy was permitted very freely before Vesalius's
time. Professor Turner's authority in such a matter is above all
suspicion. He knew the history of anatomy.
If more evidence be needed, compare with President White's fantastic
sketch of Vesalius the following sketch of his great contemporary,
Columbus or Colombo, to whose anatomical investigations we owe the
discovery of the pulmonary circulation:
"The fame of Columbus as an anatomical teacher was exceedingly great
and widespread. Students were attracted to the universities where he
professed, from all {116} quarters and in large numbers. He was an
ardent student of his favorite science and was imbued with the
genius and enthusiasm of an original investigator. He was not
satisfied with the critical examination of mere structure, but
extended his researches into the more subtle, difficult and
important investigation of the physiological function. He has been
most aptly styled the Claude Bernard of the sixteenth century. The
work of Columbus is a masterpiece of method and purity of style, as
well as on account of its richness in facts and observations. He
spent over forty years in these studies and researches. _He
dissected an extraordinary number of human bodies. It must have been
an age of remarkable tolerance for scientific investigation, for in
a single year he dissected no less than fourteen bodies._ He also
entered the crypts and catacombs of ancient churches, where the
bones of the dead had been preserved and had accumulated century
after century, and there, with unwearied care, he handled and
compared over a half million of human skulls."
This account was written by Dr. George Jackson Fisher in his
"Historical and Bibliographical Notes" for the _Annals of Anatomy and
Surgery_ (Brooklyn, 1878-1880). All the material that Dr. Fisher used
in his sketch is to be found in Roth's "Life of Vesalius," p. 256.
Now, Columbus was a contemporary of Vesalius, and worked with him at
Bologna. The years of their lives correspond almost exactly. When
Vesalius left Padua to become the royal physician to Charles V., it
was Columbus who succeeded him. Later he taught also at Pisa. Then,
strange as it may seem for those who have put any faith in Dr. White's
excursion into medical science, he was invited to become Professor of
{117} Anatomy at the Papal University at Rome, and it was while there
that he had as many as three hundred students present at his
demonstrations in anatomy and there that he did fourteen dissections
in one year. The pretense that there was any ecclesiastical objection
to dissection becomes absolutely farcical when one compares the life
of Vesalius sketched by President White with a motive, and the life of
his contemporary and successor, Columbus, by an unbiased physician,
whose only idea was to bring out the facts.
According to Prof. White's opinion, Vesalius dedicated his work to
Charles V. to shield himself as far as possible, and after this gave
up his anatomical studies in Italy to put himself under the protection
of Charles V.
Vesalius's successor, Columbus, did not have to do any such thing.
Instead, he went down to Rome, and under the protection of the Popes
continued to carry on his anatomical work there.
When Charles V. died, however, according to President White, a new
weapon was forged against Vesalius. Vesalius was charged with
dissecting a living man. President White hints that "the forces of
ecclesiasticism united against the innovators of anatomy, and either
from direct persecution or from indirect influences Vesalius became a
wanderer." Just what that means I do not know. President White does
not say that he was exiled, though that idea is implied. There is a
great deal of doubt about this charge of Vesalius having made an
autopsy on a living person. Roth discusses various versions. The whole
thing seems to be a trumped-up story; but supposing it true, would it
not be only proper that a man who made an autopsy on a living person
should be brought before the court? He certainly would {118} in our
day in any civilized country. Professor Foster, of the University of
Cambridge in England, following the lead of President White in this
matter, blames the Inquisition for instituting the prosecution. If
this were true, no more proof would be needed that the Inquisition was
a civil and not a religious institution, since after all the killing
of a man by a premature autopsy is a plain case of homicide.