Lectures on the history of physiology during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries / by Sir M. Foster.

  • Foster, M. (Michael), Sir, 1836-1907.
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Lectures on the history of physiology during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries / by Sir M. Foster. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    works of the two young men who crossed each other's path at Venice in the year of our Lord 1537. The brilliant talents of the young Belgian at once attracted the notice of the far-sighted rulers of Venice. He was in December of that same year, 1537, made Doctor of Medicine in their University of Padua, was immediately entrusted with the duty of conducting public dissections, and either then or very shortly afterwards, though he was but a lad of some one or two and twenty summers, was placed in a chair of Surgery with care of Anatomy. He at once began to teach anatomy in his own new way. Not to unskilled ignorant barbers would he entrust the task of laying bare before the students the secrets of the human frame; his own hand, and his own hand alone, was cunning enough to track out the pattern of structures which day by day were becoming more and more clear to him. Following venerated customs he began his academic labours by 'reading' Galen, as others had done before him, using his dissections to illustrate what Galen had said. But time after time the body on the table said plainly something different from that which Galen had written. He tried to do what others had done before him, he tried to believe Galen rather than his own eyes, but his eyes were too strong for him; and in the end he cast Galen and his writings to the winds and taught only what he himself had seen and what he could make his students see too. Thus he brought into anatomy the new spirit of the time, and the men of the time, the young men of the time answered to the new voice. Students flocked to his lectures, his hearers amounted it is said to some five hundred, and an enlightened Senate recognized his worth by repeatedly raising his emolu- ments. Such a mode of teaching laid a strain on the getting of the material for teaching. Vesalius was unwearied in his search for subjects to dissect. He begged all the doctors to allow him to examine the bodies of their fatal cases. He ingratiated himself with the judges, so that when a criminal was con- demned to death they gave directions that the sentence should