Legalized by imperial authority and sanctioned by the Church, dissection was no longer regarded as a crime. A bull by Pope Boniface VIII., issued in the year 1300, forbidding the evisceration of the dead and the boiling of their bodies to secure the bones for consecrated ground, as was done by the Crusaders, was wrongly interpreted as forbidding anatomical dissection. Two centuries later the Popes, standing in the vanguard of science, permitted dissections to be made in all the Italian medical schools, and paved the way for the Anatomical Renaissance. Great things were done in the sixteenth century. Under the scalpel and pen of Vesalius, anatomy was revolutionized. Surgery was guided into new paths by Ambroise Paré; and obstetrics, thanks to the labors of Eucharius Rhodion and Jacques Guillemeau, began to assume its legitimate place among the medical sciences. Servetus, visionary and argumentative, correctly described the pulmonary circulation in a theological work which was burned with its author. Eustachius, Columbus and Fallopius widened the path which had been blazed by Vesalius. Arantius, Caesalpinus and Fabricius added materially to anatomical science. The labors of all these great masters prepared the way for the greatest event occurring in the seventeenth century, namely, William Harvey’s discovery of the circulatory movement of the blood. [Illustration: INITIAL LETTER BY VESALIUS (From the “Fabrica”, 1543)] CHAPTER FIRST Anatomy in Ancient Times [Illustration: Illuminated capital] Egypt and Greece were the sources of the medical learning of the ancient world. Although the Egyptians and early Greeks possessed a certain amount of anatomical knowledge, which was gained in the one instance by the practice of embalming and in the other by an examination of the bones, no real progress could be made because of the laws, customs and prejudices of those ancient peoples. Thus we find the Egyptians stoning the operator who opened the abdomen in order that the body might be embalmed; and the Greeks inflicted the death penalty on those of their generals who, after a battle, neglected to bury or burn the remains of the slain. [Illustration: HIPPOCRATES]