The Paduan School was close to Venice and associated
with it, so that the young student had probably many opportunities of
going to and fro. On the sixth of December, 1537, before he had reached
his twenty-fourth year and shortly after taking his degree, he was
elected to the chair of surgery and anatomy at Padua.
The task Vesalius set himself to accomplish was to give an accurate
description of all the parts of the human body, with proper
illustrations. He must have had abundant material, more, probably, than
any teacher before him had ever had at his disposal. We do not know
where he conducted his dissections, as the old amphitheatre has
disappeared, but it must have been very different from the tiny one
put up by his successor, Fabricius, in 1594. Possibly it was only a
temporary building, for he says in the second edition of the "Fabrica"
that he had a splendid lecture theatre which accommodated more than five
hundred spectators (p. 681).
With Vesalius disappeared the old didactic method of teaching anatomy.
He did his own dissections, made his own preparations, and, when human
subjects were scarce, employed dogs, pigs or cats, and occasionally a
monkey. For five years he taught and worked at Padua.
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