Part 9

Of course, the appeal to Venetian opposition to the Papacy as an explanation for dissection being carried on in Italy in spite of ecclesiastical regulations to the contrary is only a subterfuge. It can only be found in histories written by those who refuse to see facts as they were, because those facts do not accord with pet theories as to Papal Opposition to Science, and the Warfare Between Theology and Science, which must be maintained at all costs, though with an air of apology always for having to tell such unpleasant truths of these old-time religious authorities.

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THE GOLDEN AGE OF ANATOMY VESALIUS.

The Golden Age of discovery in anatomy culminated during the first half of the sixteenth century. This will not be surprising if it is but recalled that this period represents the culmination also of that larger golden age of achievement in art and letters, which has been called the Renaissance. Columbus and Copernicus were giving men a new world and a new universe. Raphael, Michael Angelo, Lionardo da Vinci, the Bellinis and Titian were creating a new world of art. Most of these artists were deeply interested in anatomy. Every phase of human thought was being born anew. Unfortunately, this word Renaissance has given rise to many misunderstandings. Many people have taken its significance of re-birth to mean that art and letters, and with them education and thinking, were born again into the modern world at this time with the coming in of the New Learning, just as if there had been nothing worth while talking about in these lines of human accomplishment in the preceding centuries. Taken in this sense, the word Renaissance is entirely a misnomer. Magnificent achievements in art and letters and every form of education preceded the Renaissance by at least three or four centuries. The Gothic cathedrals and the enduring artistic development that took place in their making, the magnificent organization of technical education in the training of artist artisans by the guilds of the time (we would be glad if our technical schools could accomplish {91} anything like the same results, for evidently, though the name technical education is our invention, these medieval peoples had the reality to a high degree), and finally the universities, which have remained essentially the same down to our own day--all these serve to show how much was done for every form of education many centuries before the beginning of the Renaissance so-called.

It is not surprising that with this much of education abroad in the land men succeeded in making enduring literature in every form and in every country in Europe, and in setting examples of style in prose and verse that succeeding generations have nearly always gone back to admire lovingly. Such an amount of education and development of thinking could not have come without profound attention to science, and, as a matter of fact, there was much more anticipation of even what is most modern in our scientific thinking than most scholars seem to have any idea of. Personally, I have found, in writing the history of The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries, more that interested me in the science of this century than in almost any other department of its wonderful educational development.

We have already seen that while anatomy had during preceding centuries only the beginning of the development that it was destined to reach during the sixteenth century, it would be a serious mistake to think that the study of anatomy, having died in the old classical days, was not re-born until the sixteenth century. This would be to commit the error that many ardent devotees of the Renaissance make with regard to all the accomplishments of this period. In spite of the contrary almost universal impression, the Renaissance was not original {92} to any marked degree. With the touch of the Greek spirit that had come again into the world, it only carried the preceding work of great original thinkers to a high order of perfection. This happened as well in anatomy as in art and architecture and literature. Anatomical science was a lusty infant of great promise when Vesalius, the Father of Anatomy, came on the scene. The great painters, Raphael and Lionardo and Michael Angelo, owed much to Giotto and Fra Angelico, who had preceded them, but not more than Vesalius and his contemporaries, who did such magnificent work in original anatomical investigation, owed to Mondino, Bertrucci, Zerbi, Achillini, and above all to Berengar of Carpi and Benivieni, who did their work before and just after the sixteenth century opened. There is never a sudden development in the history of any department of man's knowledge or achievement, as there is nothing absolutely new under the sun, though it is still the custom of the young man in his graduation essay to talk of such things, and older men sometimes fail to realize the truth that in history as in biology, life always comes from preceding life--_omne vivum ex vivo_--and there is no such thing as spontaneous generation.

If the achievements of this earlier period of scientific work, which affected anatomy even more than any of the other sciences, be kept in mind, the discussion of the Golden Age of Anatomy will find its proper place in the history of the relation of the Popes to science. Though the date of the Golden Age in Anatomy follows that of the so-called reformation, there is absolutely no connection between the two series of events, for the one took place in Germany and the other in Italy. The Golden Age of Anatomy was indeed a perfectly {93} legitimate and quite to be expected culmination of the anatomical interest which had been gradually rising to a climax in the Italian universities during the preceding century. It has a definite place in the evolution of science, and is not a sudden or unlooked for phenomenon.

If there was any place in the world at the beginning of the sixteenth century in which the ecclesiastical authorities had much to say with regard to what should not be taught and what should not be studied in the universities, it was Italy. In spite of this fact, all medical men who wanted to do post-graduate work in medicine went down into Italy. This was especially true for those who desired to obtain ampler opportunities for anatomical study than were afforded by the rest of Europe. In his maturer years as a student of medicine, Vesalius went down to Italy in order to avail himself of the magnificent field for investigation that was provided there. This favorable state of affairs as regards research in anatomy had existed for more than a century before his time. It continued to be true for at least two centuries after his time. As a matter of fact, Italy was to the rest of the world of the fifteenth and sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the home of post-graduate opportunities in all sciences as well as in medicine.

These are not idle words, but are fully substantiated by the lives of the men who stand at the head of our modern medicine. More than a decade before Vesalius was born, Linacre, the distinguished English physician and founder of the Royal College of Physicians, went to Italy to complete his medical studies and incidentally also to round out his education in the midst of the new learning which was so thoroughly cultivated there. When Linacre was leaving Italy, with true classic spirit {94} he set up a little altar on the top of the Alps whence he could get his last view of the Italian plains, and greeted the charming country that he was leaving so reluctantly with the beautiful name of Alma Mater Studiorum. To him, after his return to England, English-speaking medical men owe the establishment of the institution which above all others has helped to uplift the dignity of the medical profession and make the practice of the healing art something more than a mere trade--the Royal College of Physicians.

One of Vesalius's most distinguished fellow students at Padua was Dr. John Caius, who was later to become the worthy president of the Royal College of Physicians of England and the author of certain important medical works. Dr. Caius was the first to introduce the practice of public dissections into England. Caius and Vesalius were roommates, though at the time Vesalius was an instructor at the University, and the inspiration of his originality seems to have had a great effect upon young Caius. They were nearly of the same age, though Vesalius was a precocious genius, and Caius's greatness only showed itself in maturity. Caius was studying in Italy partly because the religious disturbances in England had made it uncomfortable for him to remain in his native country, for he was a firm adherent of the old Church and he hoped they would pass over, but mainly because he coveted the opportunities afforded by that country. Later in life, out of the revenues of his position as Royal Physician to Queen Mary and subsequently for some time to Queen Elizabeth, he founded the famous Caius College at Cambridge, usually called Key's College by Cantabrigians.

Before either of these men there had been a third {95} distinguished English physician who had gone down to Italy for his education. This was the celebrated and learned John Phreas, who was born about the commencement of the fifteenth century. Very little is known of his career, but what we do know is of great interest. He was educated at Oxford and obtained a fellowship on the foundation of Balliol College. Afterward he seems to have studied medicine with a physician in England, but was not satisfied with the medical education thus obtained. He set the fashion for going down into Italy sometime during the first half of the fifteenth century, and after some years spent at Padua received the degree of doctor in medicine, which in those days carried with it, as the name implies, the right to teach. As not infrequently happens to the brilliant medical student, he settled down for practice in the university town in which he graduated, to take up both occupations, that of teacher and practitioner. He is said to have made a large fortune in the practice of physic. [Footnote 12] The best proof of his scholarship is to be found in some letters still preserved in the Bodleian and in the Library of Balliol College. Personally, I have considered that his career was interesting from another standpoint. I have often looked in history for the cases of appendicitis which occur so frequently in our day and with regard to which people ask how is it they did not occur in the past. The fact is, they did occur, but were unrecognized. People were taken suddenly ill, not infrequently a short time after a meal, and after considerable pain and fever, swelling and great tenderness in the abdomen {96} developed, and they died with all the signs of poisoning. They were actually poisoned, not by some extraneous material, but by the putrid contents of their own intestines which found a way out through the ruptured appendix. These cases were set down as poisoning cases, and usually some interested person was the subject of suspicion. Dr. Phreas's learning had obtained for him an appointment to a bishopric in England, a curious bit of evidence of the absence of opposition between medical science and religion in his time. He died shortly after this, under circumstances that raised a suspicion of poisoning in the minds of some of his contemporaries--but raises the thought of appendicitis in mine,--and one of his rivals was blamed for it.

[Footnote 12: Like the other distinguished physicians of this time, John Phreas did not devote himself to medicine alone. He had a taste for literature, and besides being an accomplished scholar he was a poet.]

Nor did the custom for English medical students to go down to Italy to complete their education cease with the so-called reformation. Some two generations after Vesalius's time another distinguished Englishman, Harvey, went down to Italy to complete the studies he had already made and eventually to lay the foundation of that knowledge on which he was twenty years later to construct his doctrine of the circulation of the blood. This doctrine, however, remained merely a theory until the distinguished Italian anatomist, Malpighi, after another half century, demonstrated the existence of the capillaries, the little blood vessels which connect the veins and arteries, and by thus showing the continuity of both the blood systems, proved beyond all doubt the certainty of the teaching that the blood does circulate.

Students came, moreover, from even the distant North of Europe to the Italian schools of medicine during these centuries. Neil Stensen, or as he is perhaps better known by his Latin name, Nicholas Steno, the {97} discoverer of the duct of the parotid gland, which has been named after him, and of many other anatomical details, especially of the fact that the heart is a muscle, which stamp him as an original investigator of the highest order, after having made extensive studies in the Netherlands and in France to complete the medical education which he had begun in his native city of Copenhagen, went down into Italy to secure freer opportunities for original research than he could obtain anywhere else in Europe. [Footnote 13]

[Footnote 13: It may perhaps be of interest to say that while doing investigation in anatomy and certain other sciences allied to medicine, Steno became a convert to the Catholic Church and after some years became a priest. Before his ordination, however, though after his conversion, he received the call to the chair of anatomy at Copenhagen. He accepted this and worked for several years at the Danish University, but was dissatisfied with the state of affairs around him as regards religion and went back to Italy. Eventually he was made a bishop--hence the curious picture of him in a Roman Catholic Bishop's robes in the collection of pictures of professors of anatomy at the University of Copenhagen. Not long after, at his own request, he was sent up to the Northern part of Germany in order to try to bring back to the Church as many of the Germans as might be won by his gentleness of disposition, his saintly character, his wonderful scientific knowledge, and his winning ways. He is the Father of Modern Geology as well as a great anatomist, and his little book on geology was published after he became a priest, yet did not hamper in any way his ecclesiastical preferment nor alienate him from his friends in the hierarchy. He was honored especially by the Popes. In a word, his career is the best possible disproof of any Papal or ecclesiastical opposition to science in his time.]

We have mentioned that it was while he was pursuing his special investigations in various Italian universities that Stensen was honored with the invitation to become professor of anatomy at the University of Copenhagen. This was not a chance event, but a type of the point of view in university education at the time. Just as at the present time the prestige of research in a German university counts for much as a recommendation for professorships in our American universities, so in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was it with regard to study in Italy. It was felt that men who had spent {98} several years there could be reasonably expected to know all that there was to be known in the rising sciences of anatomy and physiology; at the same time there was a very general impression, quite justified by the results observed, that those who did their post-graduate work in Italy were nearly always sure to make discoveries that would add to the prestige of their universities later, and that would be a stimulus to students and to the other teachers around them such as could be provided in no other way. If read in the proper spirit, the history of the universities of those times is quite like our own, only for influence, the name of Italy must always be substituted for that of Germany. Yet Italy, if we were to believe some of the writers on the history of education and science, was at this time laboring under the incubus of ecclesiastical intolerance with regard to anatomy and an almost complete suppression of opportunities for dissection. Those who write thus know nothing at all of the actual facts of the history of science, or else they are blinding themselves for some reason to the real situation.

Fortunately students of the facts of history, especially those who have devoted any serious attention to the history of medicine, make no such mistake. For them it is perfectly clear that there was a wonderful development in anatomy which took place down in Italy, beginning about the middle of the fifteenth century or even earlier, and which led to the provision of such opportunities for dissection and original research in medicine, that students from all over the world were attracted there. For instance, Professor Clifford Allbutt, in the address on the Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery to the end of the Sixteenth Century, already quoted, has a passage {99} in which, as an introduction to what he has to say about Galen, he sums up the history of anatomy from the return of the Popes from Avignon to Rome, which took place just about the beginning of the last quarter of the fourteenth century, down to the time of Vesalius. This expresses so well what I have been trying to say with regard to the gradual development that led up to the Golden Age of Anatomy and to Vesalius's work, that I quote it.

"Meanwhile, however, the return of the Popes to Rome (1374) and the displacement of the Albucasis and Avicenna by the Greek texts renewed the shriveling body of medicine, and with the help of anatomy, Italian medicine awoke again; though until the days of Vesalius and Harvey the renascence came rather from men of letters than of medicine. The Arabs and Paris said: "Why dissect if you trust Galen? _But the Italian physicians insisted on verification; and therefore back to Italy again the earnest and clear-sighted students flocked from all regions._ Vesalius was a young man when he professed in Padua, yet, young or venerable, _where but in Italy would he have won, I would not say renown, but even sufferance!_ If normal anatomy was not directly a reformer of medicine, by way of anatomy came morbid anatomy, as conceived by the genius of Benivieni, of Morgagni, and of Valsalva; the galenical or humoral doctrine of pathology was sapped, and soaring in excelsis for the essence of disease gave place to grubbing for its roots."

A sketch of Vesalius's career will give the best possible idea of the influences at work in science during this Golden Age of anatomical discovery, and will at the same time serve to show better than anything else, how {100} utterly unfounded is the opinion that there was opposition between religion, or theology and science, and above all medical science, at this time. On the other hand, it will demonstrate that the educational factors at work in Vesalius's time were not different from those of the preceding century, nor indeed from those that had existed for two or three centuries before his time; and though his magnificent original research introduced the new initiative which always comes after a genius has left his mark upon a scientific department, the spirit in which science was pursued after his time did not differ essentially from that which had prevailed before. He represents not a revolution in medical science, as has so often been said, though always with the purpose of demonstrating how much the so-called reformation accomplished in bringing about this great progress in anatomy, but only a striking epoch in that gradual evolution which had already advanced so far that his work was rendered easy and some such climax of progress as came in his time was inevitable.

Vesalius's earlier education was received entirely in his native town of Louvain. There were certain preparatory schools in connection with the university at Louvain, and to one of these, called Paedagogium Castri because of the sign over the door, which was that of a fort, Vesalius was sent. Here he learned Latin and Greek and some Hebrew. How well he learned his Latin can be realized from the fact that at twenty-two he was ready to lecture in that language on anatomy in Italy. His knowledge of Greek can be estimated from the tradition that he could translate Galen at sight, and he was known to have corrected a number of errors in translations from that author made by preceding {101} translators. To those who know the traditions of that time in the teaching of the classic languages along the Rhine and in the Low Countries, these accomplishments of Vesalius will not be surprising. They knew how to teach in those pre-reformation days, and probably Latin and Greek have never been better taught than by the Brethren of the Common Life, whose schools for nearly a hundred years had been open in the Low Countries and Rhenish Germany for the children of all classes, but especially of the poor. Other schools in the same region could scarcely fail to be uplifted by such educational traditions. Altogether, Vesalius spent some nine years in the Paedagogium.

As illustrating how men will find what interests them in spite of supposed lack of opportunities, it may be said that from his earliest years Vesalius was noted for his tendency to be inquisitive with regard to natural objects, and while still a mere boy his anatomical curiosity manifested itself in a very practical way. He recalls himself in later years, that the bladders with which he learned to swim, and which were also used by the children of the time as play-toys for making all sorts of noises, became in his hands objects of anatomical investigation. Anatomy means the cutting up of things, and this Vesalius literally did with the bladders. He noted particularly that they were composed of layers and fibres of various kinds, and later on when he was studying the veins in human and animal bodies he was reminded of these early observations, and pointed out that the vein walls were made up of structures not unlike those, though more delicate, of which the bladders of his childhood days had proven to be composed.

His preparatory studies over, Vesalius entered the {102} University of Louvain, at that time one of the most important universities of Europe. At the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, Louvain probably had more students than any other university in Europe except that of Paris, and possibly Bologna. There are good grounds for saying that the number in attendance here during the first half of the sixteenth century was always in excess of 5,000. The university was especially famous for its teaching of jurisprudence and philology. The faculty of theology, however, was considered to be one of the strongest in Europe, and Louvain, as might be expected from its position in the heart of Catholic Belgium, was generally acknowledged to be one of the great intellectual bulwarks of Catholicity against the progress of Lutheranism in the Teutonic countries at this time. Vesalius's parents were, and his family always had been, ardent Catholics, so that, quite apart from his dwelling not far away, it was very natural that he should have been sent here. He seems to have spent five years in the university mainly engaged in the study of philosophy and philology, but also of the classics and languages so far as they were taught at that time.