Olivarez’s 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’s 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. {11}

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,