ysical body,
despite St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, had been incorporated
into the formula evolved during the early Christian centuries and known
as the Apostles' Creed, and was held throughout Christendom, "always,
everywhere, and by all." This hypothetical bone was therefore held
in great veneration, and many anatomists sought to discover it; but
Vesalius, revealing so much else, did not find it. He contented himself
with saying that he left the question regarding the existence of such a
bone to the theologians. He could not lie; he did not wish to fight the
Inquisition; and thus he fell under suspicion.

The strength of this theological point may be judged from the fact that
no less eminent a surgeon than Riolan consulted the executioner to find
out whether, when he burned a criminal, all the parts were consumed;
and only then was the answer received which fatally undermined this
superstition. Yet, in 1689 we find it still lingering in France,
stimulating opposition in the Church to dissection. Even as late as the
eighteenth century, Bernouilli having shown that the living human body
constantly undergoes a series of changes, so that all its particles are
renewed in a given number of years, so much ill feeling was drawn upon
him, from theologians, who saw in this statement danger to the doctrine
of the resurrection of the body, that for the sake of peace he struck
out his argument on this subject from his collected works.(320)

(320) For permissions to dissect the human subject, given here and there
during the Middle Ages, see Roth's Andreas Vesalius, Berlin, 1892, pp.
3, 13 et seq. For religious antipathies as a factor in the persecution
of Vesalius, see the biographies by Boerhaave and Albinos, 1725;
Burggraeve's Etudes, 1841; also Haeser, Kingsley, and the latest
and most thorough of all, Roth, as above. Even Goethals, despite the
timidity natural to a city librarian in a town like Brussels, in which
clerical power is strong and relentless, feels obliged to confess that
there was a certain admixture of religious hatred in the treatment
of Vesalius. See his Notice Biographique sur Andre Vesale. For the
resurrection bones, see Roth, as above, pp. 154, 155, and notes. For
Vesalius, see especially Portal, Hist. de l'Anatomie et de la Chirurgie,
Paris, 1770, tome i, p. 407. For neglect of dissection and opposition
to Harvey's discovery in Spain, see Townsend's Travels, edition of 1792,
cited in Buckle, H