Vesalius was born in Brussels on the last day of the year 1514, of an ancestry of physicians and learned men, from whom he inherited his leaning toward scientific pursuits. Early in life he exhibited a passion for anatomy; he dissected birds, rabbits, dogs, and other animals. Although having a strong bent in this direction, he was not a man of single talent. He was schooled in all the learning of his time, and his earliest publication was a translation from the Greek of the ninth book of _Rhazes_. After his early training at Brussels and at the University of Louvain, in 1533, at the age of 18, he went to Paris to study medicine, where, in anatomy, he came under Sylvius and Günther. His Force and Independence.--His impetuous nature was shown in the amphitheatre of Sylvius, where, at the third lecture, he pushed aside the clumsy surgeon barbers, and himself exposed the parts as they should be. He could not be satisfied with the exposition of the printed page; he must see with his own eyes, must grasp through his own experience the facts of anatomical structure. This demand of his nature shows not only how impatient he was with sham, but also how much more he was in touch with reality than were the men of his time. After three years at the French capital, owing to wars in Belgium, he went back to Louvain without obtaining his medical degree. After a short experience as surgeon on the field of battle, he went to Padua, whither he was attracted by reports of the opportunities for practical dissection that he so much desired to undertake. There his talents were recognized, and just after receiving his degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1537, he was given a post in surgery, with the care of anatomy, in the university. His Reform of the Teaching of Anatomy.--The sympathetic and graphic description of this period of his career by Sir Michael Foster is so good that I can not refrain from quoting it: "He at once began to teach anatomy in his own new way. Not to unskilled, ignorant barbers would he entrust the task of laying bare before the students the secrets of the human frame; his own hand, and his own hand alone, was cunning enough to track out the pattern of the structures which day by day were becoming more clear to him. Following venerated customs, he began his academic labors by 'reading' Galen, as others had done before him, using his dissections to illustrate what Galen had said. But, time after time, the body on the table said something different from that which Galen had written.