He moved his hands and placed them gently behind her shoulders.
“I am thinking of a great fellow, who was about as old as I am three hundred years ago, and had already begun a new era in anatomy.”
“I can’t guess,” said Rosamond, shaking her head. “We used to play at guessing historical characters at Mrs Lemon’s, but not anatomists.”
“I’ll tell you. His name was Vesalius. And the only way he could get to know anatomy as he did, was by going to snatch bodies at night, from graveyards and places of execution.”
“Oh!” said Rosamond, with a look of disgust on her pretty face, “I am very glad you are not Vesalius. I should have thought he might find some less horrible way than that.”
“No, he couldn’t,” said Lydgate, going on too earnestly to take much notice of her answer. “He could only get a complete skeleton by snatching the whitened bones of a criminal from the gallows, and burying them, and fetching them away by bits secretly, in the dead of night.”
“I hope he is not one of your great heroes,” said Rosamond, half-playfully, half-anxiously, “else I shall have you getting up in the night to go to St Peter’s churchyard. You know how angry you told me the people were about Mrs Goby. You have enemies enough already.”
“So had Vesalius, Rosy. No wonder the medical fogies in Middlemarch are jealous, when some of the greatest doctors living were fierce upon Vesalius because they had believed in Galen, and he showed that Galen was wrong. They called him a liar and a poisonous monster. But the facts of the human frame were on his side; and so he got the better of them.”
“And what happened to him afterwards?” said Rosamond, with some interest.
“Oh, he had a good deal of fighting to the last. And they did exasperate him enough at one time to make him burn a good deal of his work. Then he got shipwrecked just as he was coming from Jerusalem to take a great chair at Padua. He died rather miserably.”
There was a moment’s pause before Rosamond said, “Do you know, Tertius, I often wish you had not been a medical man.”
“Nay, Rosy, don’t say that,” said Lydgate, drawing her closer to him. “That is like saying you wish you had married another man.”
“Not at all; you are clever enough for anything: you might easily have been something else. And your cousins at Quallingham all think that you have sunk below them in your choice of a profession.”
“The cousins at Quallingham may go to the devil!” said Lydgate, with scorn. “It was like their impudence if they said anything of the sort to you.”
“Still,” said Rosamond, “I do not think it is a nice profession, dear.” We know that she had much quiet perseverance in her opinion.
“It is the grandest profession in the world, Rosamond,” said Lyd-
