Health and Education

Were it not that the whole question of dissection is one over which it is right to draw a reverent veil, as a thing painful, however necessary and however innocent, it would be easy to raise ghastly laughter in many a reader by the stories which Vesalius himself tells of his struggles to learn anatomy.—How old Sylvius tried to demonstrate the human frame from a bit of a dog, fumbling in vain for muscles which he could not find, or which ought to have been there, according to Galen, and were not; while young Vesalius, as soon as the old pedant’s back was turned, took his place, and, to the delight of the students, found for him—provided it were there—what he could not find himself;—how he went body-snatching and gibbet-robbing, often at the danger of his life, as when he and his friend were nearly torn to pieces by the cannibal dogs who haunted the Butte de Montfaucon, or place of public execution;—how he acquired, by a long and dangerous process, the only perfect skeleton then in the world, and the hideous story of the robber to whom it had belonged—all these horrors those who list may read for themselves elsewhere.  I hasten past them with this remark—that to have gone through the toils, dangers, and disgusts which Vesalius faced, argued in a superstitious and cruel age like his, no common physical and moral courage, and a deep conscience that he was doing right, and must do it at all risks in the face of a generation which, peculiarly reckless of human life and human agony, allowed that frame which it called the image of God to be tortured, maimed, desecrated in every way while alive; and yet—straining at the gnat after having swallowed the camel—forbade it to be examined when dead, though for the purpose of alleviating the miseries of mankind.

The breaking out of war between Francis I. and Charles V. drove Vesalius back to his native country and Louvain; and in 1535 we hear of him as a surgeon in Charles V.’s army.  He saw, most probably, the Emperor’s invasion of Provence, and the disastrous retreat from before Montmorency’s fortified camp at Avignon, through a country in which that crafty general had destroyed every article of human food, except the half-ripe grapes.  He saw, perhaps, the Spanish soldiers, poisoned alike by the sour fruit and by the blazing sun, falling in hundreds along the white roads which led back into Savoy, murdered by the peasantry whose homesteads had been destroyed, stifled by the weight of their own armour, or desperately putting themselves, with their own hands, out of a world which had become intolerable.  Half the army perished.  Two thousand corpses lay festering between Aix and Fréjus alone.  If young Vesalius needed “subjects,” the ambition and the crime of man found enough for him in those blazing September days.

He went to Italy, probably with the remnants of the army.  Where could he have rather wished to find himself?  He was at last in the country where the human mind seemed to be growing young once more; the country of revived arts, revived sciences, learning, languages; and—though, alas, only for a while—of revived free thought, such as Europe had not seen since the palmy days of Greece.  Here at least he would be appreciated; here at least he would be allowed to think and speak: and he was appreciated.  The Italian cities, who were then, like the Athenians of old, “spending their time in nothing else save to hear or to tell something new,” welcomed the brave young Fleming and his novelties.  Within two years he was professor of anatomy at Padua, then the first school in the world; then at Bologna and at Pisa at the same time; last of all at Venice, where Titian painted that portrait of him which remains unto this day.

These years were for him a continual triumph; everywhere, as he demonstrated on the human body, students crowded his theatre, or hung round him as he walked the streets; professors left their own chairs—their scholars having deserted them already—to go and listen humbly or enviously to the man who could give them what all brave souls throughout half Europe were craving for, and craving in vain: facts.  And so, year after year, was realised that scene which stands engraved in the frontispiece of his great book—where, in the little quaint Cinquecento theatre, saucy scholars, reverend doctors, gay gentlemen, and even cowled monks, are crowding the floor, peeping over each other’s shoulders, hanging on the balustrades; while in the centre, over his “subject”—which one of those same cowled monks knew but too well—stands young Vesalius, upright, proud, almost defiant, as one who knows himself safe in the impregnable citadel of fact; and in his hand the little blade of steel, destined—because wielded in obedience to the laws of nature, which are the laws of God—to work more benefit for the human race than all the swords which were drawn in those days, or perhaps in any other, at the bidding of most Catholic Emperors and most Christian Kings.

Those were indeed days of triumph for Vesalius; of triumph deserved, because earned by patient and accurate toil in a good cause: but Vesalius, being but a mortal man, may have contracted in those same days a temper of imperiousness and self-conceit, such as he showed afterwards when his pupil Fallopius dared to add fresh discoveries to those of his master.  And yet, in spite of all Vesalius knew, how little he knew!  How humbling to his pride it would have been had he known then—perhaps he does know now—that he had actually again and again walked, as it were, round and round the true theory of the circulation of the blood, and yet never seen it; that that discovery which, once made, is intelligible, as far as any phenomenon is intelligible, to the merest peasant, was reserved for another century, and for one of those Englishmen on whom Vesalius would have looked as semi-barbarians.

To make a long story short: three years after the publication of his famous book, ‘De Corporis Humani Fabrica,’ he left Venice to cure Charles V., at Regensburg, and became one of the great Emperor’s physicians.

This was the crisis of Vesalius’ life.  The medicine with which he had worked the cure was China—Sarsaparilla, as we call it now—brought home from the then newly-discovered banks of the Paraguay and Uruguay, where its beds of tangled vine, they say, tinge the clear waters a dark brown like that of peat, and convert whole streams into a healthful and pleasant tonic.  On the virtues of this China (then supposed to be a root) Vesalius wrote a famous little book, into which he contrived to interweave his opinions on things in general, as good Bishop Berkeley did afterwards into his essay on the virtues of tar-water.  Into this book, however, Vesalius introduced—as Bishop Berkeley did not—much, and perhaps too much, about himself; and much, though perhaps not too much, about poor old Galen, and his substitution of an ape’s inside for that of a human being.  The storm which had been long gathering burst upon him.  The old school, trembling for their time-honoured reign, bespattered, with all that pedantry, ignorance, and envy could suggest, the man who dared not only to revolutionise surgery, but to interfere with the privileged mysteries of medicine; and, over and above, to become a favourite at the court of the greatest of monarchs.  While such as Eustachius, himself an able discoverer, could join in the cry, it is no wonder if a lower soul, like that of Sylvius, led it open-mouthed.  He was a mean, covetous, bad man, as George Buchanan well knew; and, according to his nature, he wrote a furious book, ‘Ad Vesani calumnias depulsandas.’  The punning change of Vesalius into Vesanus (madman) was but a fair and gentle stroke for a polemic, in days in which those who could not kill their enemies with steel or powder, held themselves justified in doing so, if possible, by vituperation, culumny, and every engine of moral torture.  But a far more terrible weapon, and one which made Vesalius rage, and it may be for once in his life tremble, was the charge of impiety and heresy.  The Inquisition was a very ugly place.  It was very easy to get into it, especially for a Netherlander: but not so easy to get out.  Indeed Vesalius must have trembled, when he saw his master, Charles V., himself take fright, and actually call on the theologians of Salamanca to decide whether it was lawful to dissect a human body.  The monks, to their honour, used their common sense, and answered Yes.  The deed was so plainly useful, that it must be lawful likewise.  But Vesalius did not feel that he had triumphed.  He dreaded, possibly, lest the storm should only have blown over for a time.  He fell, possibly, into hasty disgust at the folly of mankind, and despair of arousing them to use their common sense, and acknowledge their true interest and their true benefactors.  At all events, he threw into the fire—so it is said—all his unpublished manuscripts, the records of long years of observation, and renounced science thenceforth.

We hear of him after this at Brussels, and at Basle likewise—in which latter city, in the company of physicians, naturalists, and Grecians, he must have breathed awhile a freer air.  But he seems to have returned thence to his old master Charles V., and to have finally settled at Madrid as a court surgeon to Philip II., who sent him, but too late, to extract the lance splinters from the eye of the dying Henry II.

He was now married to a lady of rank from Brussels, Anne van Hamme by name; and their daughter married in time Philip II.’s grand falconer, who was doubtless a personage of no small social rank.  He was well off in worldly things; somewhat fond, it is said, of good living and of luxury; inclined, it may be, to say, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” and to sink more and more into the mere worldling, unless some shock awoke him from his lethargy.

And the awakening shock did come.  After eight years of court life, he resolved early in the year 1564 to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

The reasons for so strange a determination are wrapped in mystery and contradiction.  The common story was that he had opened a corpse to ascertain the cause of death, and that, to the horror of the bystanders, the heart was still seen to beat; that his enemies accused him to the Inquisition, and that he was condemned to death, a sentence which was commuted to that of going on pilgrimage.  But here, at the very outset, accounts differ.  One says that the victim was a nobleman, name not given; another that it was a lady’s maid, name not given.  It is most improbable, if not impossible, that Vesalius, of all men, should have mistaken a living body for a dead one; while it is most probable, on the other hand, that his medical enemies would gladly raise such a calumny against him, when he was no longer in Spain to contradict it.  Meanwhile Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, makes no mention of Vesalius having been brought before its tribunal, while he does mention Vesalius’ residence at Madrid.  Another story is, that he went abroad to escape the bad temper of his wife; another that he wanted to enrich himself.  Another story—and that not an unlikely one—is, that he was jealous of the rising reputation of his pupil Fallopius, then professor of anatomy at Venice.  This distinguished surgeon, as I said before, had written a book, in which he had added to Vesalius’ discoveries, and corrected certain errors of his.  Vesalius had answered him hastily and angrily, quoting his anatomy from memory; for, as he himself complained, he could not in Spain obtain a subject for dissection; not even, he said, a single skull.  He had sent his book to Venice to be published, and had heard, seemingly, nothing of it.

He may have felt that he was falling behind in the race of science, and that it was impossible for him to carry on his studies in Madrid; and so, angry with his own laziness and luxury, he may have felt the old sacred fire flash up in him, and have determined to go to Italy and become a student and a worker once more.

The very day that he set out, Clusius of Arras, then probably the best botanist in the world, arrived at Madrid; and, asking the reason of Vesalius’ departure, was told by their fellow-countryman, Charles de Tisnacq, procurator for the affairs of the Netherlands, that Vesalius had gone of his own free will, and with all facilities which Philip could grant him, in performance of a vow which he had made during a dangerous illness.  Here, at least, we have a drop of information, which seems taken from the stream sufficiently near to the fountain-head: but it must be recollected that De Tisnacq lived in dangerous times, and may have found it necessary to walk warily in them; that through him had been sent, only the year before, that famous letter from William of Orange, Horn, and Egmont, the fate whereof may be read in Mr. Motley’s fourth chapter; that the crisis of the Netherlands which sprung out of that letter was coming fast; and that, as De Tisnacq was on friendly terms with Egmont, he may have felt his head at times somewhat loose on his shoulders; especially if he had heard Alva say, as he wrote, “that every time he saw the despatches of those three señors, they moved his choler so, that if he did not take much care to temper it, he would seem a frenzied man.”  In such times, De Tisnacq may have thought good to return a diplomatic answer to a fellow-countryman concerning a third fellow-countryman, especially when that countryman, as a former pupil of Melancthon at Wittemberg, might himself be under suspicion of heresy, and therefore of possible treason.

Be this as it may, one cannot but suspect some strain of truth in the story about the Inquisition; perhaps in that, also, of his wife’s unkindness; for, whether or not Vesalius operated on Don Carlos, he had seen with his own eyes that miraculous Virgin of Atocha at the bed’s foot of the prince.  He had heard his recovery attributed, not to the operation, but to the intercession of Fray, now Saint, Diego;12 and he must have had his thoughts thereon, and may, in an unguarded moment, have spoken them.

For he was, be it always remembered, a Netherlander.  The crisis of his country was just at hand.  Rebellion was inevitable, and, with rebellion, horrors unutterable; and, meanwhile, Don Carlos had set his mad brain on having the command of the Netherlands.  In his rage at not having it, as all the world knows, he nearly killed Alva with his own hands, some two years after.  If it be true that Don Carlos felt a debt of gratitude to Vesalius, he may (after his wont) have poured out to him some wild confidence about the Netherlands, to have even heard which would be a crime in Philip’s eyes.  And if this be but a fancy, still Vesalius was, as I just said, a Netherlander, and one of a brain and a spirit to which Philip’s doings, and the air of the Spanish court, must have been growing even more and more intolerable.  Hundreds of his country folk, perhaps men and women whom he had known, were being racked, burnt alive, buried alive, at the bidding of a jocular ruffian, Peter Titelmann, the chief inquisitor.  The “day of the mau-brulez,” and the wholesale massacre which followed it, had happened but two years before; and, by all the signs of the times, these murders and miseries were certain to increase.  And why were all these poor wretches suffering the extremity of horror, but because they would not believe in miraculous images, and bones of dead friars, and the rest of that science of unreason and unfact, against which Vesalius had been fighting all his life, consciously or not, by using reason and observing fact?  What wonder if, in some burst of noble indignation and just contempt, he forgot a moment that he had sold his soul, and his love of science likewise, to be a luxurious, yet uneasy, hanger-on at the tyrant’s court; and spoke unadvisedly some word worthy of a German man?

As to the story of his unhappy quarrels with his wife, there may be a grain of truth in it likewise.  Vesalius’ religion must have sat very lightly on him.  The man who had robbed churchyards and gibbets from his youth was not likely to be much afraid of apparitions and demons.  He had handled too many human bones to care much for those of saints.  He was probably, like his friends of Basle, Montpellier, and Paris, somewhat of a heretic at heart, probably somewhat of a pagan.  His lady, Anne van Hamme, was probably a strict Catholic, as her father, being a councillor and master of the exchequer at Brussels, was bound to be; and freethinking in the husband, crossed by superstition in the wife, may have caused in them that wretched vie à part, that want of any true communion of soul, too common to this day in Catholic countries.

Be these things as they may—and the exact truth of them will now be never known—Vesalius set out to Jerusalem in the spring of 1564.  On his way he visited his old friends at Venice to see about his book against Fallopius.  The Venetian republic received the great philosopher with open arms.  Fallopius was just dead; and the senate offered their guest the vacant chair of anatomy.  He accepted it: but went on to the East.

He never occupied that chair; wrecked upon the Isle of Zante, as he was sailing back from Palestine, he died miserably of fever and want, as thousands of pilgrims returning from the Holy Land had died before him.  A goldsmith recognised him; buried him in a chapel of the Virgin; and put up over him a simple stone, which remained till late years; and may remain, for aught I know, even now.

So perished, in the prime of life, “a martyr to his love of science,” to quote the words of M. Burggraeve of Ghent, his able biographer and commentator, “the prodigious man, who created a science at an epoch when everything was still an obstacle to his progress; a man whose whole life was a long struggle of knowledge against ignorance, of truth against lies.”

Plaudite: Exeat: with Rondelet and Buchanan.  And whensoever this poor foolish world needs three such men, may God of his great mercy send them.

1

9, Adam Street, Adelphi, London.

2

I quote from the translation of the late lamented Philip Stanhope Worsley, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

3

Odyssey, book vi. 127-315; vol. i. pp. 143-150 of Mr. Worsley’s translation.

4

Since this essay was written, I have been sincerely delighted to find that my wishes had been anticipated at Girton College, near Cambridge, and previously at Hitchin, whence the college was removed: and that the wise ladies who superintend that establishment propose also that most excellent institution—a swimming bath.  A paper, moreover, read before the London Association of Schoolmistresses in 1866, on “Physical Exercises and Recreation for Girls,” deserves all attention.  May those who promote such things prosper as they deserve.

5

For an account of Sorcery and Fetishism among the African Negros, see Burton’s ‘Lake Regions of Central Africa,’ vol. ii. pp. 341-360.

6

An arcade in the King’s School, Chester.

7

So says Dr. Irving, writing in 1817.  I have, however, tried in vain to get a sight of this book.  I need not tell Scotch scholars how much I am indebted throughout this article to Dr. David living’s erudite second edition of Buchanan’s Life.

8

From the quaint old translation of 1721, by “A Person of Honour of the Kingdom of Scotland.”

9

A Life of Rondelet, by his pupil Laurent Joubert, is to be found appended to his works; and with it an account of his illness and death, by his cousin, Claude Formy, which is well worth the perusal of any man, wise or foolish.  Many interesting details beside, I owe to the courtesy of Professor Planchon, of Montpellier, author of a discourse on ‘Rondelet et ses Disciples,’ which appeared, with a learned and curious Appendice, in the ‘Montpellier Médical’ for 1866.

10

I owe this account of Bloet’s—which appears to me the only one trustworthy—to the courtesy and erudition of Professor Henry Morley, who finds it quoted from Bloet’s ‘Acroama,’ in the ‘Observationum Medicarum Rariorum, lib. vii.,’ of John Theodore Schenk.  Those who wish to know several curious passages of Vesalius’ life, which I have not inserted in this article, would do well to consult one by Professor Morley, ‘Anatomy in Long Clothes,’ in ‘Fraser’s Magazine’ for November, 1853.  May I express a hope, which I am sure will be shared by all who have read Professor Morley’s biographies of Jerome Cardan and of Cornelius Agrippa, that he will find leisure to return to the study of Vesalius’ life; and will do for him what he has done for the two just-mentioned writers?

11

Olivarez’ ‘Relacion’ is to be found in the Granvelle State Papers.  For the general account of Don Carlos’ illness, and of the miraculous agencies by which his cure was said to have been effected, the general reader should consult Miss Frere’s ‘Biography of Elizabeth of Valois,’ vol. i. pp. 307-19.

12

In justice to poor Doctor Olivarez, it must be said, that while he allows all force to the intercession of the Virgin and of Fray Diego, and of “many just persons,” he cannot allow that there was any “miracle properly so called,” because the prince was cured according to “natural order,” and by “experimented remedies” of the physicians.