I cannot begin a sketch of the life of this great man better than by
trying to describe a scene so picturesque, so tragic in the eyes of those
who are wont to mourn over human follies, so comic in the eyes of those
who prefer to laugh over them, that the reader will not be likely to
forget either it or the actors in it.
It is a darkened chamber in the College of Alcala, in the year 1562,
where lies, probably in a huge four-post bed, shrouded in stifling
hangings, the heir-apparent of the greatest empire in the then world, Don
Carlos, only son of Philip II., and heir-apparent of Spain, the
Netherlands, and all the Indies. A short sickly boy of sixteen, with a
bull head, a crooked shoulder, a short leg, and a brutal temper, he will
not be missed by the world if he should die. His profligate career seems
to have brought its own punishment. To the scandal of his father, who
tolerated no one's vices save his own, as well as to the scandal of the
university authorities of Alcala, he has been scouring the streets at the
head of the most profligate students, insulting women, even ladies of
rank, and amenable only to his lovely young stepmother, Elizabeth of
Valois, Isabel de la Paz, as the Spaniards call her, the daughter of
Catherine de Medicis, and sister of the King of France. Don Carlos
should have married her, had not his worthy father found it more
advantageous for the crown of Spain, as well as more pleasant for him
Philip, to marry her himself. Whence came heart-burnings, rage,
jealousies, romances, calumnies, of which two last--in as far at least as
they concern poor Elizabeth--no wise man now believes a word.
Going on some errand on which he had no business--there are two stories,
neither of them creditable nor necessary to repeat--Don Carlos has fallen
down stairs and broken his head. He comes, by his Portuguese mother's
side, of a house deeply tainted with insanity; and such an injury may
have serious consequences. However, for nine days the wound goes on
well, and Don Carlos, having had a wholesome fright, is, according to
Doctor Olivarez, the _medico de camara_, a very good lad, and lives on
chicken broth and dried plums. But on the tenth day comes on numbness of
the left side, acute pains in the head, and then gradually shivering,
high fever, erysipelas. His head and neck swell to an enormous size;
then comes raging delirium, then stupefaction, and Don Carlos lies as one
dead.
A modern surgeon would, probably, thanks to that training of which
Vesalius may be almost called the father, have had little difficulty in
finding out what was the matter with the luckless lad, and little
difficulty in removing the evil, if it had not gone too far. But the
Spanish physicians were then, as many of them are said to be still, as
far behind the world in surgery as in other things; and indeed surgery
itself was then in its infancy, because men, ever since the early Greek
schools of Alexandria had died out, had been for centuries feeding their
minds with anything rather than with facts. Therefore the learned
morosophs who were gathered round Don Carlos's sick bed had become,
according to their own confession, utterly confused, terrified, and at
their wits' end.
It is the 7th of May, the eighteenth day after the accident, according to
Olivarez' story: he and Dr. Vega have been bleeding the unhappy prince,
enlarging the wound twice, and torturing him seemingly on mere guesses.
"I believe," says Olivarez, "that all was done well: but as I have said,
in wounds in the head there are strange labyrinths." So on the 7th they
stand round the bed in despair. Don Garcia de Toledo, the prince's
faithful governor, is sitting by him, worn out with sleepless nights, and
trying to supply to the poor boy that mother's tenderness which he has
never known. Alva too is there, stern, self-compressed, most terrible,
and yet most beautiful. He has a God on earth, and that is Philip his
master; and though he has borne much from Don Carlos already, and will
have to bear more, yet the wretched lad is to him as a son of God, a
second deity, who will by right divine succeed to the inheritance of the
first; and he watches this lesser deity struggling between life and death
with an intensity of which we, in these less loyal days, can form no
notion. One would be glad to have a glimpse of what passed through that
mind, so subtle and so ruthless, so disciplined and so loyal withal: but
Alva was a man who was not given to speak his mind, but to act it.
One would wish, too, for a glimpse of what was passing through the mind
of another man, who has been daily in that sick chamber, according to
Olivarez' statement, since the first of the month: but he is one who has
had, for some years past, even more reason than Alva for not speaking his
mind. What he looked like we know well, for Titian has painted him from
the life--a tall, bold, well-dressed man, with a noble brain, square and
yet lofty, short curling locks and beard, an eye which looks as though it
feared neither man nor fiend--and it has had good reason to fear both--and
features which would be exceeding handsome, but for the defiant
snub-nose. That is Andreas Vesalius, of Brussels, dreaded and hated by
the doctors of the old school--suspect, moreover, it would seem, to
inquisitors and theologians, possibly to Alva himself; for he has dared
to dissect human bodies; he has insulted the medievalists at Paris,
Padua, Bologna, Pisa, Venice, in open theatre; he has turned the heads of
all the young surgeons in Italy and France; he has written a great book,
with prints in it, designed, some say, by Titian--they were actually done
by another Netherlander, John of Calcar, near Cleves--in which he has
dared to prove that Galen's anatomy was at fault throughout, and that he
had been describing a monkey's inside when he had pretended to be
describing a man's; and thus, by impudence and quackery, he has wormed
himself--this Netherlander, a heretic at heart, as all Netherlanders are,
to God as well as to Galen--into the confidence of the late Emperor
Charles V., and gone campaigning with him as one of his physicians,
anatomising human bodies even on the battle-field, and defacing the
likeness of Deity; and worse than that, the most religious King Philip is
deceived by him likewise, and keeps him in Madrid in wealth and honour;
and now, in the prince's extreme danger, the king has actually sent for
him, and bidden him try his skill--a man who knows nothing save about
bones and muscles and the outside of the body, and is unworthy the name
of a true physician.
One can conceive the rage of the old Spanish pedants at the
Netherlander's appearance, and still more at what followed, if we are to
believe Hugo Bloet of Delft, his countryman and contemporary. {390}
Vesalius, he says, saw that the surgeons had bound up the wound so tight
that an abscess had formed outside the skull, which could not break: he
asserted that the only hope lay in opening it; and did so, Philip having
given leave, "by two cross-cuts. Then the lad returned to himself, as if
awakened from a profound sleep, affirming that he owed his restoration to
life to the German doctor."
Dionysius Daza, who was there with the other physicians and surgeons,
tells a different story: "The most learned, famous, and rare Baron
Vesalius," he says, advised that the skull should be trepanned; but his
advice was not followed.
Olivarez' account agrees with that of Daza. They had opened the wounds,
he says, down to the skull before Vesalius came. Vesalius insisted that
the injury lay inside the skull, and wished to pierce it. Olivarez
spends much labour in proving that Vesalius had "no great foundation for
his opinion:" but confesses that he never changed that opinion to the
last, though all the Spanish doctors were against him. Then on the 6th,
he says, the Bachelor Torres came from Madrid, and advised that the skull
should be laid bare once more; and on the 7th, there being still doubt
whether the skull was not injured, the operation was performed--by whom
it is not said--but without any good result, or, according to Olivarez,
any discovery, save that Vesalius was wrong, and the skull uninjured.
"Whether this second operation of the 7th of May was performed by
Vesalius, and whether it was that of which Bloet speaks, is an open
question. Olivarez' whole relation is apologetic, written to justify
himself and his seven Spanish colleagues, and to prove Vesalius in the
wrong. Public opinion, he confesses, had been very fierce against him.
The credit of Spanish medicine was at stake: and we are not bound to
believe implicitly a paper drawn up under such circumstances for Philip's
eye. This, at least, we gather: that Don Carlos was never trepanned, as
is commonly said; and this, also, that whichever of the two stories is
true, equally puts Vesalius into direct, and most unpleasant, antagonism
to the Spanish doctors. {392}
But Don Carlos still lay senseless; and yielding to popular clamour, the
doctors called in the aid of a certain Moorish doctor, from Valencia,
named Priotarete, whose unguents, it was reported, had achieved many
miraculous cures. The unguent, however, to the horror of the doctors,
burned the skull till the bone was as black as the colour of ink; and
Olivarez declares he believes it to have been a preparation of pure
caustic. On the morning of the 9th of May, the Moor and his unguents
were sent away, "and went to Madrid, to send to heaven Hernando de Vega,
while the prince went back to our method of cure."
Considering what happened on the morning of the 10th of May, we should
now presume that the second opening of the abscess, whether by Vesalius
or someone else, relieved the pressure on the brain; that a critical
period of exhaustion followed, probably prolonged by the Moor's premature
caustic, which stopped the suppuration: but that God's good handiwork,
called nature, triumphed at last; and that therefore it came to pass that
the prince was out of danger within three days of the operation. But he
was taught, it seems, to attribute his recovery to a very different
source from that of a German knife. For on the morning of the 9th, when
the Moor was gone, and Don Carlos lay seemingly lifeless, there descended
into his chamber a Deus e machina, or rather a whole pantheon of greater
or lesser deities, who were to effect that which medical skill seemed not
to have effected. Philip sent into the prince's chamber several of the
precious relics which he usually carried about with him. The miraculous
image of the Virgin of Atocha, in embroidering garments for whom, Spanish
royalty, male and female, has spent so many an hour ere now, was brought
in solemn procession and placed on an altar at the foot of the prince's
bed; and in the afternoon there entered, with a procession likewise, a
shrine containing the bones of a holy anchorite, one Fray Diego, "whose
life and miracles," says Olivarez, "are so notorious;" and the bones of
St. Justus and St. Pastor, the tutelar saints of the university of
Alcala. Amid solemn litanies the relics of Fray Diego were laid upon the
prince's pillow, and the sudarium, or mortuary cloth, which had covered
his face, was placed upon the prince's forehead.
Modern science might object that the presence of so many personages,
however pious or well intentioned, in a sick chamber on a hot Spanish May
day, especially as the bath had been, for some generations past, held in
religious horror throughout Spain, as a sign of Moorish and Mussulman
tendencies, might have somewhat interfered with the chances of the poor
boy's recovery. Nevertheless the event seems to have satisfied Philip's
highest hopes; for that same night (so Don Carlos afterwards related) the
holy monk Diego appeared to him in a vision, wearing the habit of St.
Francis, and bearing in his hand a cross of reeds tied with a green band.
The prince stated that he first took the apparition to be that of the
blessed St. Francis; but not seeing the stigmata, he exclaimed, "How?
Dost thou not bear the marks of the wounds?" What he replied Don Carlos
did not recollect; save that he consoled him, and told him that he should
not die of that malady.
Philip had returned to Madrid, and shut himself up in grief in the great
Jeronymite monastery. Elizabeth was praying for her step-son before the
miraculous images of the same city. During the night of the 9th of May
prayers went up for Don Carlos in all the churches of Toledo, Alcala, and
Madrid. Alva stood all that night at the bed's foot. Don Garcia de
Toledo sat in the arm-chair, where he had now sat night and day for more
than a fortnight. The good preceptor, Honorato Juan, afterwards Bishop
of Osma, wrestled in prayer for the lad the whole night through. His
prayer was answered: probably it had been answered already, without his
being aware of it. Be that as it may, about dawn Don Carlos' heavy
breathing ceased; he fell into a quiet sleep; and when he awoke all
perceived at once that he was saved.
He did not recover his sight, seemingly on account of the erysipelas, for
a week more. He then opened his eyes upon the miraculous image of
Atocha, and vowed that, if he recovered, he would give to the Virgin, at
four different shrines in Spain, gold plate of four times his weight; and
silver plate of seven times his weight, when he should rise from his
couch. So on the 6th of June he rose, and was weighed in a fur coat and
a robe of damask, and his weight was three arrobas and one pound--seventy-
six pounds in all. On the 14th of June he went to visit his father at
the episcopal palace; then to all the churches and shrines in Alcala, and
of course to that of Fray Diego, whose body it is said he contemplated
for some time with edifying devotion. The next year saw Fray Diego
canonised as a saint, at the intercession of Philip and his son; and thus
Don Carlos re-entered the world, to be a terror and a torment to all
around him, and to die--not by Philip's cruelty, as his enemies reported
too hastily indeed, yet excusably, for they knew him to be capable of any
wickedness--but simply of constitutional insanity.
And now let us go back to the history of "that most learned, famous, and
rare Baron Vesalius," who had stood by and seen all these things done;
and try if we cannot, after we have learned the history of his early
life, guess at some of his probable meditations on this celebrated
clinical case; and guess also how those meditations may have affected
seriously the events of his after life.
Vesalius (as I said) was a Netherlander, born at Brussels in 1513 or
1514. His father and grandfather had been medical men of the highest
standing in a profession which then, as now, was commonly hereditary. His
real name was Wittag, an ancient family of Wesel, on the Rhine, from
which town either he or his father adopted the name of Vesalius,
according to the classicising fashion of those days. Young Vesalius was
sent to college at Louvain, where he learned rapidly. At sixteen or
seventeen he knew not only Latin, but Greek enough to correct the proofs
of Galen, and Arabic enough to become acquainted with the works of the
Mussulman physicians. He was a physicist, too, and a mathematician,
according to the knowledge of those times; but his passion--the study to
which he was destined to devote his life--was anatomy.
Little or nothing (it must be understood) had been done in anatomy since
the days of Galen of Pergamos, in the second century after Christ, and
very little even by him. Dissection was all but forbidden among the
ancients. The Egyptians, Herodotus tells us, used to pursue with stones
and curses the embalmers as soon as they had performed their unpleasant
office; and though Herophilus and Erasistratus are said to have dissected
many subjects under the protection of Ptolemy Soter in Alexandria itself:
yet the public feeling of the Greeks as well as of the Romans continued
the same as that of the ancient Egyptians; and Galen was fain--as
Vesalius proved--to supplement his ignorance of the human frame by
describing that of an ape. Dissection was equally forbidden among the
Mussulmans; and the great Arabic physicians could do no more than comment
on Galen. The same prejudice extended through the middle age. Medical
men were all clerks, clerici, and as such forbidden to shed blood. The
only dissection, as far as I am aware, made during the middle age was one
by Mundinus in 1306; and his subsequent commentaries on Galen--for he
dare allow his own eyes to see no more than Galen had seen before
him--constituted the best anatomical manual in Europe till the middle of
the fifteenth century.
Then, in Italy at least, the classic Renaissance gave fresh life to
anatomy as to all other sciences. Especially did the improvements in
painting and sculpture stir men up to a closer study of the human frame.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote a treatise on muscular anatomy: the artist and
the sculptor often worked together, and realised that sketch of Michael
Angelo's in which he himself is assisting Fallopius, Vesalius' famous
pupil, to dissect. Vesalius soon found that his thirst for facts could
not be slaked by the theories of the middle age; so in 1530 he went off
to Montpellier, where Francis I. had just founded a medical school, and
where the ancient laws of the city allowed the faculty each year the body
of a criminal. From thence, after becoming the fellow-pupil and the
friend of Rondelet, and probably also of Rabelais and those other
luminaries of Montpellier, of whom I spoke in my essay on Rondelet, he
returned to Paris to study under old Sylvius, whose real name was Jacques
Dubois, _alias_ Jock o' the Wood; and to learn less--as he complains
himself--in an anatomical theatre than a butcher might learn in his shop.
Were it not that the whole question of dissection is one over which it is
right to draw a reverent veil, as a thing painful, however necessary and
however innocent, it would be easy to raise ghastly laughter in many a
reader by the stories which Vesalius himself tells of his struggles to
learn anatomy.--How old Sylvius tried to demonstrate the human frame from
a bit of a dog, fumbling in vain for muscles which he could not find, or
which ought to have been there, according to Galen, and were not; while
young Vesalius, as soon as the old pedant's back was turned, took his
place, and, to the delight of the students, found for him--provided it
were there--what he could not find himself;--how he went body-snatching
and gibbet-robbing, often at the danger of his life, as when he and his
friend were nearly torn to pieces by the cannibal dogs who haunted the
Butte de Montfaucon, or place of public execution;--how he acquired, by a
long and dangerous process, the only perfect skeleton then in the world,
and the hideous story of the robber to whom it had belonged--all these
horrors those who list may read for themselves elsewhere. I hasten past
them with this remark--that to have gone through the toils, dangers, and
disgusts which Vesalius faced, argued in a superstitious and cruel age
like his, no common physical and moral courage, and a deep conscience
that he was doing right, and must do it at all risks in the face of a
generation which, peculiarly reckless of human life and human agony,
allowed that frame which it called the image of God to be tortured,
maimed, desecrated in every way while alive; and yet--straining at the
gnat after having swallowed the camel--forbade it to be examined when
dead, though for the purpose of alleviating the miseries of mankind.
The breaking out of war between Francis I. and Charles V. drove Vesalius
back to his native country and Louvain; and in 1535 we hear of him as a
surgeon in Charles V.'s army. He saw, most probably, the Emperor's
invasion of Provence, and the disastrous retreat from before
Montmorency's fortified camp at Avignon, through a country in which that
crafty general had destroyed every article of human food, except the half-
ripe grapes. He saw, perhaps, the Spanish soldiers, poisoned alike by
the sour fruit and by the blazing sun, falling in hundreds along the
white roads which led back into Savoy, murdered by the peasantry whose
homesteads had been destroyed, stifled by the weight of their own armour,
or desperately putting themselves, with their own hands, out of a world
which had become intolerable. Half the army perished. Two thousand
corpses lay festering between Aix and Frejus alone. If young Vesalius
needed "subjects," the ambition and the crime of man found enough for him
in those blazing September days.
He went to Italy, probably with the remnants of the army. Where could he
have rather wished to find himself? He was at last in the country where
the human mind seemed to be growing young once more; the country of
revived arts, revived sciences, learning, languages; and--though, alas,
only for a while--of revived free thought, such as Europe had not seen
since the palmy days of Greece. Here at least he would be appreciated;
here at least he would be allowed to think and speak: and he was
appreciated. The Italian cities, who were then, like the Athenians of
old, "spending their time in nothing else save to hear or to tell
something new," welcomed the brave young Fleming and his novelties.
Within two years he was professor of anatomy at Padua, then the first
school in the world; then at Bologna and at Pisa at the same time; last
of all at Venice, where Titian painted that portrait of him which remains
unto this day.
These years were for him a continual triumph; everywhere, as he
demonstrated on the human body, students crowded his theatre, or hung
round him as he walked the streets; professors left their own
chairs--their scholars having deserted them already--to go and listen
humbly or enviously to the man who could give them what all brave souls
throughout half Europe were craving for, and craving in vain: facts. And
so, year after year, was realised that scene which stands engraved in the
frontispiece of his great book--where, in the little quaint Cinquecento
theatre, saucy scholars, reverend doctors, gay gentlemen, and even cowled
monks, are crowding the floor, peeping over each other's shoulders,
hanging on the balustrades; while in the centre, over his "subject"--which
one of those same cowled monks knew but too well--stands young Vesalius,
upright, proud, almost defiant, as one who knows himself safe in the
impregnable citadel of fact; and in his hand the little blade of steel,
destined--because wielded in obedience to the laws of nature, which are
the laws of God--to work more benefit for the human race than all the
swords which were drawn in those days, or perhaps in any other, at the
bidding of most Catholic Emperors and most Christian Kings.
Those were indeed days of triumph for Vesalius; of triumph deserved,
because earned by patient and accurate toil in a good cause: but
Vesalius, being but a mortal man, may have contracted in those same days
a temper of imperiousness and self-conceit, such as he showed afterwards
when his pupil Fallopius dared to add fresh discoveries to those of his
master. And yet, in spite of all Vesalius knew, how little he knew! How
humbling to his pride it would have been had he known then--perhaps he
does know now--that he had actually again and again walked, as it were,
round and round the true theory of the circulation of the blood, and yet
never seen it; that that discovery which, once made, is intelligible, as
far as any phenomenon is intelligible, to the merest peasant, was
reserved for another century, and for one of those Englishmen on whom
Vesalius would have looked as semi-barbarians.
To make a long story short: three years after the publication of his
famous book, 'De Corporis Humani Fabrica,' he left Venice to cure Charles
V., at Regensburg, and became one of the great Emperor's physicians.
This was the crisis of Vesalius' life. The medicine with which he had
worked the cure was China--Sarsaparilla, as we call it now--brought home
from the then newly-discovered banks of the Paraguay and Uruguay, where
its beds of tangled vine, they say, tinge the clear waters a dark brown
like that of peat, and convert whole streams into a healthful and
pleasant tonic. On the virtues of this China (then supposed to be a
root) Vesalius wrote a famous little book, into which he contrived to
interweave his opinions on things in general, as good Bishop Berkeley did
afterwards into his essay on the virtues of tar-water. Into this book,
however, Vesalius introduced--as Bishop Berkeley did not--much, and
perhaps too much, about himself; and much, though perhaps not too much,
about poor old Galen, and his substitution of an ape's inside for that of
a human being. The storm which had been long gathering burst upon him.
The old school, trembling for their time-honoured reign, bespattered,
with all that pedantry, ignorance, and envy could suggest, the man who
dared not only to revolutionise surgery, but to interfere with the
privileged mysteries of medicine; and, over and above, to become a
favourite at the court of the greatest of monarchs. While such as
Eustachius, himself an able discoverer, could join in the cry, it is no
wonder if a lower soul, like that of Sylvius, led it open-mouthed. He
was a mean, covetous, bad man, as George Buchanan well knew; and,
according to his nature, he wrote a furious book, 'Ad Vesani calumnias
depulsandas.' The punning change of Vesalius into Vesanus (madman) was
but a fair and gentle stroke for a polemic, in days in which those who
could not kill their enemies with steel or powder, held themselves
justified in doing so, if possible, by vituperation, culumny, and every
engine of moral torture. But a far more terrible weapon, and one which
made Vesalius rage, and it may be for once in his life tremble, was the
charge of impiety and heresy. The Inquisition was a very ugly place. It
was very easy to get into it, especially for a Netherlander: but not so
easy to get out. Indeed Vesalius must have trembled, when he saw his
master, Charles V., himself take fright, and actually call on the
theologians of Salamanca to decide whether it was lawful to dissect a
human body. The monks, to their honour, used their common sense, and
answered Yes. The deed was so plainly useful, that it must be lawful
likewise. But Vesalius did not feel that he had triumphed. He dreaded,
possibly, lest the storm should only have blown over for a time. He
fell, possibly, into hasty disgust at the folly of mankind, and despair
of arousing them to use their common sense, and acknowledge their true
interest and their true benefactors. At all events, he threw into the
fire--so it is said--all his unpublished manuscripts, the records of long
years of observation, and renounced science thenceforth.
We hear of him after this at Brussels, and at Basle likewise--in which
latter city, in the company of physicians, naturalists, and Grecians, he
must have breathed awhile a freer air. But he seems to have returned
thence to his old master Charles V., and to have finally settled at
Madrid as a court surgeon to Philip II., who sent him, but too late, to
extract the lance splinters from the eye of the dying Henry II.
He was now married to a lady of rank from Brussels, Anne van Hamme by
name; and their daughter married in time Philip II.'s grand falconer, who
was doubtless a personage of no small social rank. He was well off in
worldly things; somewhat fond, it is said, of good living and of luxury;
inclined, it may be, to say, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die," and to sink more and more into the mere worldling, unless some
shock awoke him from his lethargy.
And the awakening shock did come. After eight years of court life, he
resolved early in the year 1564 to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
The reasons for so strange a determination are wrapped in mystery and
contradiction. The common story was that he had opened a corpse to
ascertain the cause of death, and that, to the horror of the bystanders,
the heart was still seen to beat; that his enemies accused him to the
Inquisition, and that he was condemned to death, a sentence which was
commuted to that of going on pilgrimage. But here, at the very outset,
accounts differ. One says that the victim was a nobleman, name not
given; another that it was a lady's maid, name not given. It is most
improbable, if not impossible, that Vesalius, of all men, should have
mistaken a living body for a dead one; while it is most probable, on the
other hand, that his medical enemies would gladly raise such a calumny
against him, when he was no longer in Spain to contradict it. Meanwhile
Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, makes no mention of Vesalius
having been brought before its tribunal, while he does mention Vesalius'
residence at Madrid. Another story is, that he went abroad to escape the
bad temper of his wife; another that he wanted to enrich himself. Another
story--and that not an unlikely one--is, that he was jealous of the
rising reputation of his pupil Fallopius, then professor of anatomy at
Venice. This distinguished surgeon, as I said before, had written a
book, in which he had added to Vesalius' discoveries, and corrected
certain errors of his. Vesalius had answered him hastily and angrily,
quoting his anatomy from memory; for, as he himself complained, he could
not in Spain obtain a subject for dissection; not even, he said, a single
skull. He had sent his book to Venice to be published, and had heard,
seemingly, nothing of it.
He may have felt that he was falling behind in the race of science, and
that it was impossible for him to carry on his studies in Madrid; and so,
angry with his own laziness and luxury, he may have felt the old sacred
fire flash up in him, and have determined to go to Italy and become a
student and a worker once more.
The very day that he set out, Clusius of Arras, then probably the best
botanist in the world, arrived at Madrid; and, asking the reason of
Vesalius' departure, was told by their fellow-countryman, Charles de
Tisnacq, procurator for the affairs of the Netherlands, that Vesalius had
gone of his own free will, and with all facilities which Philip could
grant him, in performance of a vow which he had made during a dangerous
illness. Here, at least, we have a drop of information, which seems
taken from the stream sufficiently near to the fountain-head: but it must
be recollected that De Tisnacq lived in dangerous times, and may have
found it necessary to walk warily in them; that through him had been
sent, only the year before, that famous letter from William of Orange,
Horn, and Egmont, the fate whereof may be read in Mr. Motley's fourth
chapter; that the crisis of the Netherlands which sprung out of that
letter was coming fast; and that, as De Tisnacq was on friendly terms
with Egmont, he may have felt his head at times somewhat loose on his
shoulders; especially if he had heard Alva say, as he wrote, "that every
time he saw the despatches of those three senors, they moved his choler
so, that if he did not take much care to temper it, he would seem a
frenzied man." In such times, De Tisnacq may have thought good to return
a diplomatic answer to a fellow-countryman concerning a third
fellow-countryman, especially when that countryman, as a former pupil of
Melancthon at Wittemberg, might himself be under suspicion of heresy, and
therefore of possible treason.
Be this as it may, one cannot but suspect some strain of truth in the
story about the Inquisition; perhaps in that, also, of his wife's
unkindness; for, whether or not Vesalius operated on Don Carlos, he had
seen with his own eyes that miraculous Virgin of Atocha at the bed's foot
of the prince. He had heard his recovery attributed, not to the
operation, but to the intercession of Fray, now Saint, Diego; {408} and
he must have had his thoughts thereon, and may, in an unguarded moment,
have spoken them.
For he was, be it always remembered, a Netherlander. The crisis of his
country was just at hand. Rebellion was inevitable, and, with rebellion,
horrors unutterable; and, meanwhile, Don Carlos had set his mad brain on
having the command of the Netherlands. In his rage at not having it, as
all the world knows, he nearly killed Alva with his own hands, some two
years after. If it be true that Don Carlos felt a debt of gratitude to
Vesalius, he may (after his wont) have poured out to him some wild
confidence about the Netherlands, to have even heard which would be a
crime in Philip's eyes. And if this be but a fancy, still Vesalius was,
as I just said, a Netherlander, and one of a brain and a spirit to which
Philip's doings, and the air of the Spanish court, must have been growing
even more and more intolerable. Hundreds of his country folk, perhaps
men and women whom he had known, were being racked, burnt alive, buried
alive, at the bidding of a jocular ruffian, Peter Titelmann, the chief
inquisitor. The "day of the _mau-brulez_," and the wholesale massacre
which followed it, had happened but two years before; and, by all the
signs of the times, these murders and miseries were certain to increase.
And why were all these poor wretches suffering the extremity of horror,
but because they would not believe in miraculous images, and bones of
dead friars, and the rest of that science of unreason and unfact, against
which Vesalius had been fighting all his life, consciously or not, by
using reason and observing fact? What wonder if, in some burst of noble
indignation and just contempt, he forgot a moment that he had sold his
soul, and his love of science likewise, to be a luxurious, yet uneasy,
hanger-on at the tyrant's court; and spoke unadvisedly some word worthy
of a German man?
As to the story of his unhappy quarrels with his wife, there may be a
grain of truth in it likewise. Vesalius' religion must have sat very
lightly on him. The man who had robbed churchyards and gibbets from his
youth was not likely to be much afraid of apparitions and demons. He had
handled too many human bones to care much for those of saints. He was
probably, like his friends of Basle, Montpellier, and Paris, somewhat of
a heretic at heart, probably somewhat of a pagan. His lady, Anne van
Hamme, was probably a strict Catholic, as her father, being a councillor
and master of the exchequer at Brussels, was bound to be; and
freethinking in the husband, crossed by superstition in the wife, may
have caused in them that wretched vie a part, that want of any true
communion of soul, too common to this day in Catholic countries.
Be these things as they may--and the exact truth of them will now be
never known--Vesalius set out to Jerusalem in the spring of 1564. On his
way he visited his old friends at Venice to see about his book against
Fallopius. The Venetian republic received the great philosopher with
open arms. Fallopius was just dead; and the senate offered their guest
the vacant chair of anatomy. He accepted it: but went on to the East.
He never occupied that chair; wrecked upon the Isle of Zante, as he was
sailing back from Palestine, he died miserably of fever and want, as
thousands of pilgrims returning from the Holy Land had died before him. A
goldsmith recognised him; buried him in a chapel of the Virgin; and put
up over him a simple stone, which remained till late years; and may
remain, for aught I know, even now.
So perished, in the prime of life, "a martyr to his love of science," to
quote the words of M. Burggraeve of Ghent, his able biographer and
commentator, "the prodigious man, who created a science at an epoch when
everything was still an obstacle to his progress; a man whose whole life
was a long struggle of knowledge against ignorance, of truth against
lies."
Plaudite: Exeat: with Rondelet and Buchanan. And whensoever this poor
foolish world needs three such men, may God of his great mercy send them.