tullian and St. Augustine held anatomy in abhorrence.[1] Boniface VIII. interdicted dissection as sacrilege.[2]
Through this sacred conventionalism Vesalius broke without fear. Braving ecclesiastical censure and popular fury, he studied his science by the only method that could give useful results. Ko peril daunted him. To secure the material for his investigations, he haunted gibbets and charnel-houses; in this search he risked alike the fires of the Inquisition and the virus of the plague. First of all men he began to place the great science of human anatomy on its solid, modern foundations—on careful examination and observation of the human body. This was his first great sin, and it was soon aggravated by one considered even greater.
Perhaps the most unfortunate thing that has ever been done for Christianity is the tying it to forms of science which are doomed and gradually sinking. Just as in the time of Roger Bacon, excellent but mistaken men devoted all their energies to binding Christianity to Aristotle; just as in the time of Reuchlin and Erasmus, they insisted on binding Christianity to Thomas Aquinas—so in the time of Vesalius, such men made every effort to link Christianity to Galen.
The cry has been the same in all ages; it is the same which we hear in this age for curbing scientific studies—the cry for what is called "sound learning." Whether standing for Aristotle against Bacon, or Aquinas against Erasmus, or Galen against Vesalius, or making mechanical Greek verses at Eton instead of studying the handiwork of the Almighty, or reading Euripides with translations instead of Lessing and Goethe in the original, the cry always is for "sound learning." The idea always is that these studies are safe.
At twenty-eight years of age Vesalius gave to the world his great work on human anatomy. With it ended the old and began the new. Its researches, by their thoroughness, were a triumph of science; its illustrations, by their fidelity, were a triumph of art.
To shield himself as far as possible in the battle which he foresaw must come, Vesalius prefaced the work by a dedication to the Emperor Charles V. In this dedicatory preface he argues for his method, and against the parrot repetitions of the mediæval textbooks; he also condemns the wretched anatomical preparations and specimens made by physicians who utterly refused to advance beyond the ancient master.
The parrot-like repeaters of Galen gave battle at once. After the
- ↑ For Tertullian and Augustine against anatomical investigation, see Blount's "Essays," cited in Buckle's "Posthumous Works," vol. ii.,pp. 107, 108. The passage from St. Augustine is in "Civ. Dei," xxii., p. 24. See Abbé Migne, "Patrologia," vol. xl., p. 791.
- ↑ For Boniface VIII. and his interdiction of dissections, see Buckle's "Posthumous Works," vol. ii., p. 567. For injurious effects of this ecclesiastical hostility to anatomy upon the development of art, see Woltman, "Holbein and His Time," pp. 266, 267. For an excellent statement of the true relation of the medical profession to religious questions, see Prof. Acland, "General Relations of Medicine in Modern Times," Oxford, 1868.
