hilus ["Contradicere Herophilo in anatomicis, est
contradicere evangelium," was a saying of Fallopius.] made those six
hundred dissections of which Tertullian accused him, and the sagacious
Erasistratus introduced his mild antiphlogistic treatment in opposition
to the polypharmacy and antidotal practice of his time. It is significant
that the large-minded Galen should have been the physician and friend of
the imperial philosopher Marcus Aurelius. The Arabs gave laws in various
branches of knowledge to those whom their arms had invaded, or the terror
of their spreading dominion had reached, and the point from which they
started was, as Humboldt acknowledges, "the study of medicine, by which
they long ruled the Christian Schools," and to which they added the
department of chemical pharmacy.

Look at Vesalius, the contemporary of Luther. Who can fail to see one
common spirit in the radical ecclesiastic and the reforming
court-physician? Both still to some extent under the dominion of the
letter: Luther holding to the real presence; Vesalius actually causing to
be drawn and engraved two muscles which he knew were not found in the
human subject, because they had been described by Galen, from dissections
of the lower animals. Both breaking through old traditions in the search
of truth; one, knife in hand, at the risk of life and reputation, the
other at the risk of fire and fagot, with that mightier weapon which all
the devils could not silence, though they had been thicker than the tiles
on the house-tops. How much the physician of the Catholic Charles V. had
in common with the great religious destructive, may be guessed by the
relish with which he tells the story how certain Pavian students exhumed
the body of an "elegans scortum," or lovely dame of ill repute, the
favorite of a monk of the order of St. Anthony, who does not seem to have
resisted temptation so well as the founder of his order. We have always
ranked the physician Rabelais among the early reformers, but I do not
know that Vesalius has ever been thanked for his hit at the morals of the
religious orders, or for turning to the good of science what was intended
for the "benefit of clergy."

Our unfortunate medical brother, Michael Servetus, the spiritual patient
to whom the theological moxa was applied over the entire surface for the
cure of his heresy, came very near anticipating Harvey. The same
quickened thought of the time which led him to dispute the dogma o