Note.--Vesalius, the great anatomist, studied at Louvain and Paris,
and was called by Venice to the chair of surgery in the University
of Padua. He was one of the first physiologists to dissect the human
body, and his great work "The Structure of the Human Body" was an
open attack on the physiology of Galen. The book excited such
violent opposition, not only in the Church but in the University,
that in a fit of discouragement he burned his remaining manuscripts
and accepted the post of physician at the Court of Charles V., and
afterward of his son, Philip II, of Spain. This closed his life of
free enquiry, for the Inquisition forbade all scientific research,
and the dissection of corpses was prohibited in Spain. Vesalius led
for many years the life of the rich and successful court physician,
but regrets for his past were never wholly extinguished, and in 1561
they were roused afresh by the reading of an anatomical treatise by
Gabriel Fallopius, his successor in the chair at Padua. From that
moment life in Spain became intolerable to Vesalius, and in 1563 he
set out for the East. Tradition reports that this journey was a
penance to which the Church condemned him for having opened the body
of a woman before she was actually dead; but more probably Vesalius,
sick of his long servitude, made the pilgrimage a pretext to escape
from Spain.

Fallopius had meanwhile died, and the Venetian Senate is said to
have offered Vesalius his old chair; but on the way home from
Jerusalem he was seized with illness, and died at Zante in 1564.