r
having tried in vain to demonstrate some muscle, or nerve, or vein, left
the room, his pupil Vesalius slipped down to the table, dissected out
the part with great neatness, and triumphantly called the professor's
attention to it on his return.

Besides studying under Sylvius, Vesalius had for his teacher at Paris
the famous Winter, of Andernach, who was physician to Francis I. This
learned man, in a work published three years after this period, speaks
of Vesalius as a youth of great promise. At the age of nineteen Vesalius
returned to Louvain; and here for the first time he openly demonstrated
from the human subject. In this connection a somewhat ghastly story is
told, which serves to show the intensity of the enthusiasm with which
our anatomist was inspired. On a certain evening it chanced that
Vesalius, in company with a friend, had rambled out of the gates of
Louvain to a spot where the bodies of executed criminals were wont to
be exposed. A noted robber had been executed. His body had been chained
to a stake and slowly roasted; and the birds had so entirely stripped
the bones of every vestige of flesh, that a perfect skeleton, complete
and clean, was suspended before the eyes of the anatomist, who had been
striving hitherto to piece together such a thing out of the bones of
many people, gathered as occasion offered. Mounting upon the shoulder of
his friend, Vesalius ascended the charred stake and forcibly tore away
the limbs, leaving only the trunk, which was securely bound by iron
chains. With these stolen bones under their clothes the two youths
returned to Louvain. In the night, however, and alone, the sturdy
Vesalius found his way again to the place--which to most men, at any
rate in those times, would have been associated with unspeakable
horrors--and there, by sheer force, wrenched away the trunk, and buried
it. Then leisurely and carefully, day after day, he smuggled through the
city gates bone after bone. Afterwards, when he had set up the perfect
skeleton in his own house, he did not hesitate to demonstrate from it.
But such an act of daring plunder could not escape detection, and he was
banished from Louvain for the offence. This story is here quoted only to
show the extraordinary physical and moral courage which the anatomist
possessed; which upheld him through toils, dangers, and disgusts; and by
which he was strengthened to carry on, even in a cruel and
superstitious age, and placed, as he was, on the