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,