I must show that I have since repented more than once of my impatience,
and regretted that I did not take the advice of the friends who were
then with me."
There is no such pathetic tragedy in the history of our profession.
Before the age of thirty Vesalius had effected a revolution in anatomy;
he became the valued physician of the greatest court of Europe; but call
no man happy till he is dead! A mystery surrounds his last days. The
story is that he had obtained permission to perform a post-mortem
examination on the body of a young Spanish nobleman, whom he had
attended. When the body was opened, the spectators to their horror saw
the heart beating, and there were signs of life! Accused, so it is said,
by the Inquisition of murder and also of general impiety he only escaped
through the intervention of the King, with the condition that he make a
pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In carrying this out in 1564 he was wrecked
on the island of Zante, where he died of a fever or of exhaustion, in
the fiftieth year of his age.
To the North American Review, November, 1902, Edith Wharton contributed
a poem on "Vesalius in Zante," in which she pictures his life, so
full of accomplishment, so full of regrets--regrets accentuated by the
receipt of an anatomical treatise by Fallopius, the successor to the
chair in Padua! She makes him say:
There are two ways of spreading light; to be
The candle or the mirror that reflects it.
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