had bound up the wound so tight
that an abscess had formed outside the skull, which could not break: he
asserted that the only hope lay in opening it; and did so, Philip having
given leave, "by two cross-cuts. Then the lad returned to himself, as if
awakened from a profound sleep, affirming that he owed his restoration to
life to the German doctor."

Dionysius Daza, who was there with the other physicians and surgeons,
tells a different story: "The most learned, famous, and rare Baron
Vesalius," he says, advised that the skull should be trepanned; but his
advice was not followed.

Olivarez' 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' 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. {392}

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 o