patient, who—as the story goes—had celebrated his recovery by eating and drinking to excess. This debauch promptly caused his death—probably by cerebral apoplexy; but the sons were convinced that it was the result of poison administered by Zerbi, and accordingly they lost no time in starting out to capture the supposed murderer. Their first act, on reaching the vessel which they were pursuing, was to kill the younger of the two sons, in the presence of the father, by sawing his body in two lengthwise. Then they killed Zerbi himself in the same manner.
Tiraboschi, the first historian of Italian literature (1731-1794),
is mentioned by Dezeimeris as his authority for this
terrible tale. The events here narrated occurred in 1505.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century—the period with which our history now has to deal—the only available knowledge of anatomy was that which had been supplied by Galen in the third century of the Christian era, and which had been handed down through all the intervening centuries as something absolutely correct and not to be challenged. But the time had arrived when men were no longer willing to accept as truth the teachings of any individual until they had subjected them afresh to the most searching investigations; and thus it came about that a group of remarkably able men devoted all their energies, during the greater part of the sixteenth century, to a very critical study of human anatomy. As the work accomplished by these men constitutes a very important chapter—perhaps the most important chapter—in the history of medicine, I may be pardoned if I devote a disproportionately large amount of space to the consideration of the careers of the more prominent of these founders of modern anatomy, and to an enumeration of the details of the work which they accomplished, and which furnished the most complete verification of the truth stated by Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam (1561-1626), in the following words (translation):—
Man has no other means of getting at and revealing the truth
than by induction coupled with a never-tiring, unprejudiced
observation of nature and an imitation of her operations. Actual
