This profound reverence for authority, this belief in supernatural agencies, and this stagnation of true science, was the condition which prevailed at the beginning of the sixteenth century. But education gradually spread, and at this time thinkers arose, who, dissatisfied with mere assumptions, or the baseless dicta of previous authorities, commenced working at the rudiments of the science which had hitherto rested on such imperfect foundations.
Protestantism broke forth, marking the commencement of the age of free inquiry, the spirit of which had so often been quenched in blood to burst forth again irrepressibly, and henceforth to continue and spread abroad with little interruption. The Italians—and more especially the republican Venetians—appear to have been peculiarly free from the prejudice against the dissection of human bodies which generally prevailed; the study of anatomy was warmly encouraged at Padua and Bologna; and, owing to this liberal spirit, Mondino, in the fourteenth century, was enabled to demonstrate human anatomy by actual dissection. But he was so trammelled by tradition and the authority of Galen, that he perpetuated numberless errors, which would have been patent enough to an unprejudiced mind. So powerful were these influences, even two hundred years later, that Berenger, who boasted of having dissected one hundred subjects at Bologna, and who added largely to anatomical knowledge, ventured to dispute or correct but few of the propositions of his predecessors in the study. To Vesalius belongs the credit of daring to expose the errors of the Galenian system. A Fleming by birth, he early migrated to Venetia, and lectured with immense success at Padua, and afterward at Bologna and Pisa. So prominently does his simple adherence to facts and disregard of tradition and prejudice, exhibit him as superior to the more servile workers in the science of medicine before his time, who were in reality mere commentators on Hippocrates and Galen, that he has been called the father of human anatomy. He elaborated a comprehensive system, which, although necessarily incomplete, contained few mistakes, and he exposed and corrected a vast number of errors, which, up to that time, had been received without question.
The beginning of the sixteenth century, when Luther nailed his ninety five propositions to the gates of Wittenberg, marked the commencement of a new era in science, as well as in religion. The spirit of Protestantism influenced the study of medicine, and Vesalius did not stand alone. Linacre, who had studied at Padua before the time of Vesalius, had just established the College of Physicians in London, thus emancipating medicine to a great extent from priestly influence. Hitherto the power of approving and licensing practitioners had been committed to the bishops in their several dioceses, and the practice of physic was accordingly engrossed by illiterate monks and other ignorant empirics, who, as the charter of the
