[853] Hist. de l’Anatomie, i. 277. Portal remarks in his preface, p. xii, that many discoveries supposed to be modern may be detected in the old anatomists; thus Berenger knew that the thorax is larger in man, and the pelvis in woman, which a living anatomist, he says, has assumed as his own. But the Greek sculptors surely knew this as well as Berenger or Portal.
Vesalius. 12. Every early anatomist was left far behind when Vesalius, a native of Brussels, who acquired in early youth an extraordinary reputation on this side of the Alps, and in 1540 became professor of the science at Pavia, published at Basle, in 1543, his great work De Corporis Humani Fabrica. If Vesalius was not quite to anatomy what Copernicus was to astronomy, he has yet been said, a little hyperbolically, to have discovered a new world. A superstitious prejudice against human dissection had restrained the ancient anatomists in general to pigs and apes, though Galen, according to Portal, had some experience in the former. Mundinus and Berenger, by occasionally dissecting the human body, had thrown much additional light on its structure; and the superficial muscles, those immediately under the integuments, had been studied by Da Vinci and others for the purposes of painting and sculpture. Vesalius first gave a complete description of the human body, with designs which, at the time, were ascribed to Titian. We have here therefore a great step made in science; the precise estimation of Vesalius’s discoveries must be sought, of course, in anatomical history.[854]
[854] Portal p. 394-433.
Portal’s account of him. 13. “Vesalius,” says Portal, in the rapturous strain of one devoted to his own science, “appears to me one of the greatest men who ever existed. Let the astronomers vaunt their Copernicus, the natural philosophers their Galileo and Torricelli, the mathematicians their Pascal, the geographers their Columbus, I shall always place Vesalius above all their heroes. The first study for man is man. Vesalius has had this noble object in view, and has admirably attained it, he has made on himself and his fellows such discoveries as Columbus could only make by travelling to the extremity of the world. The discoveries of Vesalius are of direct importance to man; by acquiring fresh knowledge of his own structure, man seems to enlarge his existence; while discoveries in geography or astronomy affect him but in a very indirect manner.” He proceeds to compare him with Winslow, in order to show how little had been done in the intermediate time. Vesalius seems not to have known the osteology of the ear. His account of the teeth is not complete; but he first clearly described the bones of the feet. He has given a full account of the muscles, but with some mistakes, and was ignorant of a very few. In his account of the sanguineous and nervous systems, the errors seem more numerous. He describes the intestines better than his predecessors, and the heart very well; the organs of generation not better than they, and sometimes omits their discoveries; the brain admirably, little having since been added.
His human dissections. 14. The zeal of Vesalius and his fellow-students for anatomical science led them to strange scenes of adventure. Those services, which have since been thrown on the refuse of mankind, they voluntarily undertook.
Entire affection scorneth nicer hands.
They prowled by night in charnel-houses, they dug up the dead from the grave, they climbed the gibbet, in fear and silence, to steal the mouldering carcase of the murderer; the risk of ignominious punishment, and the secret stings of superstitious remorse, exalting no doubt the delight of these useful, but not very enviable pursuits.[855]
[855] Portal, p. 395.
Fate of Vesalius. 15. It may be mentioned here, that Vesalius, after living for some years in the court of Charles and Philip as their physician, met with a strange reverse, characteristic enough of such a place. Being absurdly accused of having dissected a Spanish gentleman before he was dead, Vesalius only escaped capital punishment, at the instance of the inquisition, by undertaking a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, during which he was shipwrecked, and died of famine in one of the Greek islands.[856]
[856] Portal, Tiraboschi, ix. 34. Biogr. Univ.