e history of anatomy by insisting on
doing the dissections himself. It was not long, however, before he
realized that Paris could not afford him such opportunities as he
desired. Altogether he did not remain there more than a year, and then
returned to the Low Countries.

At Louvain he continued his anatomical work, finding it difficult
enough to procure human material, but using such as might come to
hand. The story is told of his first attempt to get a complete
skeleton. A felon had been executed just outside the walls of Louvain,
and his remains were, as was the custom at that time, allowed to swing
on the gibbet until the birds of the air had eaten his flesh and the
wind and rain had bleached his bones. As might be thought, these bones
were a great temptation to Vesalius. Finally, one night he and a
fellow student stole out of the town and robbed the gibbet of its
treasure. In order to accomplish their task--no easy one, because the
skeleton was fastened to the beams of the scaffold by iron
shackles--they had to remain out all night. They buried it and later
removed it piecemeal, and when they had finally assembled the parts
again it was exhibited as a skeleton brought from Paris.

Even this story has been made to do duty as showing the ecclesiastical
opposition to dissection and the advancement of anatomical knowledge.
It is hard to understand, however, why men will not look at such an
incident from the standpoint of our own experience in {105} the modern
time. There are men still alive in certain states of the Union who
recall how much trouble they had to go to as medical students in order
to procure a skeleton. If we go back fifty years, nearly every
skeleton that physicians had in their offices was obtained in some way
almost as surreptitious as that just described, or was purchased
through some underhand channel. They were dug up from potter's field,
or sometimes procured from complacent prison officials, or
occasionally stolen from respectable cemeteries. In this respect
Vesalius was not much worse off than were his medical colleagues for
nearly three centuries and a half after his time in the northern
countries. It was easier to procure such material in Italy.

Vesalius had that precious quality that makes the investigator desire
to see and know things for himself. He could not get opportunities for
definite anatomical knowledge in the western part of Europe, so he
gave up his practice, though Louvain, his