viewed as the first of an illustrious line of teachers by whom the anatomical reputation of that country was in the course of the 16th century raised to the greatest eminence.
Vesalius is known as the first author of a comprehensive and systematic view of human anatomy. The knowledge with which his dissections had furnished him proved how many errors were daily taught and learned under the broad mantle of Galenian authority; and he perceived the necessity of a new system of anatomical instruction, divested of the omissions of ignorance and the misrepresentations of prejudice and fancy. The early age at which he effected this object has been to his biographers the theme of boundless commendation; and we are told that he began at the age of twenty-five to arrange the materials he had collected, and accomplished his task ere he had completed his 28th year.
Soon after this period we find him invited as imperial physician to the court of Charles V., where he was occupied in the duties of practice and answering the various charges which were unceasingly brought against him by the disciples of Galen. After the abdication of Charles he continued at court in great favour with his son Philip II. To this he seems to have been led principally by the troublesome controversies in which his anatomical writings had involved him. It is painful to think, however, that even imperial patronage bestowed on eminent talents does not ensure immunity from popular prejudice; and the fate of Vesalius will be a lasting example of the barbarism of the times, and of the precarious tenure of the safety even of a great physician. On the preliminary circumstances authors are not agreed; but the most general account states that when Vesalius was dissecting, with the consent of his kinsmen, the body of a Spanish grandee, it was observed that the heart still gave some feeble palpitations when divided by the knife. The immediate effects of this outrage to human feelings were the denunciation of the anatomist to the Inquisition; and Vesalius escaped the severe treatment of that tribunal only by the influence of the king, and by promising to perform a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He forthwith proceeded to Venice, from which he sailed with the Venetian fleet, under James Malatesta, for Cyprus. When he reached Jerusalem, he received from the Venetian senate a message requesting him again to accept the Paduan professorship, which had become vacant by the death of his friend and pupil Fallopius. His destiny, however, which pursued him fast, suffered him not again to breathe the Italian air. After struggling for many days with the adverse winds in the Ionian Sea, he was wrecked on the island of Zante, where he quickly breathed his last in such penury that unless a liberal goldsmith had defrayed the funeral charges, his remains must have been devoured by beasts of prey. At the time of his death he was scarcely fifty years of age.
To form a correct estimate of the character and merits of Vesalius, we must not compare him, in the spirit of modern perfection, with the anatomical authors either of later times or of the present day. Whoever would frame a just idea of this anatomist must imagine, not a bold innovator without academical learning, not a genius coming from a foreign country, unused to the forms and habits of Catholic Europe, nor a wild reformer, blaming indiscriminately everything which accorded not with his opinion; but a young student scarcely emancipated from the authority of instructors, whose intellect was still influenced by the doctrines with which it had been originally imbued,—a scholar strictly trained in the opinions of the time, living amidst men who venerated Galen as the oracle of anatomy and the divinity of medicine,—exercising his reason to estimate the soundness of the instructions then in use, and proceeding, in the way least likely to offend authority and wound prejudice, to rectify errors, and to establish on the solid basis of observation the true elements of anatomical science. Vesalius has been denominated the founder of human anatomy; and though we have seen that in this career he was preceded with honour by Mondino and Berenger, still the small proportion of correct observation which their reverence for Galen and Arabian doctrines allowed them to communicate, will not in a material degree impair the original merits of Vesalius. The errors which he rectified and the additions which he made are so numerous, that it is impossible, in such a sketch as the present, to communicate a just idea of them.
Besides the first good description of the sphenoid bone, he showed that the sternum consists of three portions and the sacrum of five or six; and described accurately the vestibule in the interior of the temporal bone. He not only verified the observation of Etienne on the valves of the hepatic veins, but he described well the vena azygos, and discovered the canal which passes in the foetus between the umbilical vein and the vena cava, since named ductus venosus. He described the omentum, and its connexions with the stomach, the spleen and the colon; gave the first correct views of the structure of the pylorus; remarked the small size of the caecal appendix in man; gave the first good account of the mediastinum and pleura and the fullest description of the anatomy of the brain yet advanced. He appears, however, not to have understood well the inferior recesses; and his account of the nerves is confused by regarding the optic as the first pair, the third as the fifth and the fifth as the seventh.
The labours of Vesalius were not limited to the immediate effect produced by his own writings. His instructions and examples produced a multitude of anatomical inquirers of different characters and varied celebrity, by whom the science was extended and rectified. Of these we cannot speak in detail; but historical justice requires us to notice shortly those to whose exertions the science of anatomy has been most indebted.
The first that claims attention on this account is Bartolomeo Eustachi of San Severino, near Salerno, who though greatly less fortunate in reputation than his contemporary Vesalius, divides with him the merit of creating the science of human anatomy. He extended the knowledge Eustachius.of the internal ear by rediscovering and describing correctly the tube which bears his name; and if we admit that G. F. Ingrassias anticipated him in the knowledge of the third bone of the tympanal cavity, the stapes, he is still the first who described the internal and anterior muscles of the malleus, as also the stapedius, and the complicated figure of the cochlea. He is the first who studied accurately the anatomy of the teeth, and the phenomena of the first and second dentition. The work, however, which demonstrates at once the great merit and the unhappy fate of Eustachius is his Anatomical Engravings, which, though completed in 1552, nine years after the impression of the work of Vesalius, the author was unable to publish. First communicated to the world in 1714 by G. M. Lancisi, afterwards in 1744 by Cajetan Petrioli, again in 1744 by B. S. Albinus, and subsequently at Bonn in 1790, the engravings show that Eustachius had dissected with the greatest care and diligence, and taken the utmost pains to give just views of the shape, size and relative position of the organs of the human body.
The first seven plates illustrate the history of the kidneys and some of the facts relating to the structure of the ear. The eighth represents the heart, the ramifications of the vena azygos, and the valve of the vena cava, named from the author. In the seven subsequent plates is given a succession of different views of the viscera of the chest and abdomen. The seventeenth contains the brain and spinal cord; and the eighteenth more accurate views of the origin, course and distribution of the nerves than had been given before. Fourteen plates are devoted to the muscles.
Eustachius did not confine his researches to the study of relative anatomy. He investigated the intimate structure of organs with assiduity and success. What was too minute for unassisted vision he inspected by means of glasses. Structure which could not be understood in the recent state, he unfolded by maceration in different fluids, or rendered more distinct by injection and exsiccation. The facts unfolded in these figures are so important that it is justly remarked by Lauth, that if the author himself had been fortunate enough to publish them, anatomy would have attained the perfection of the 18th century two centuries earlier at least. Their seclusion for that period in the papal library has given celebrity to many names which would have been known only in the verification of the discoveries of Eustachius.
