omical works of the period, and for this purpose I
put before you two figures from a text-book on the subject that was
available for students during the first half of the sixteenth century.
In the figures and text of the "Fabrica" we have anatomy as we know it;
and let us be honest and say, too, largely as Galen knew it. Time will
not allow me to go into the question of the relations of these two
great anatomists, but we must remember that at this period Galen ruled
supreme, and was regarded in the schools as infallible. And now, after
five years of incessant labor, Vesalius was prepared to leave his
much loved Padua and his devoted students. He had accomplished an
extraordinary work. He knew, I feel sure, what he had done. He knew that
the MSS. contained something that the world had not seen since the great
Pergamenian sent the rolls of his "Manual of Anatomy" among his friends.
Too precious to entrust to any printer but the best--and the best in the
middle of the sixteenth century was Transalpine--he was preparing to go
north with the precious burden. We can picture the youthful teacher--he
was but twenty-eight--among students in a university which they
themselves controlled--some of them perhaps the very men who five years
before had elected him--at the last meeting with his class, perhaps
giving a final demonstration of the woodcuts, which were of an accuracy
and beauty never seen before by students' eyes, and reading his
introduction. There would be sad hearts at the parting, for never had
anyone taught anatomy as he had taught it--no one had ever known anatomy
as he knew it. But the strong, confident look was on his face and with
the courage of youth and sure of the future, he would picture a happy
return to attack new and untried problems. Little did he dream that his
happy days as student and teacher were finished, that his work as an
anatomist was over, that the most brilliant and epoch-making part of his
career as a professor was a thing of the past. A year or more was spent
at Basel with his friend Oporinus supervising the printing of the
great work, which appeared in 1543 with the title "De Humani Corporis
Fabrica." The worth of a book, as of a man, must be judged by results,
and, so judged, the "Fabrica" is one of the great books of the world,
and would come in any century of volumes which embraced the richest
harvest of the human mind. In medicine, it represents the full flower
of the Renaissance. As a book