In 1544 a Flemish engraver named Thomas Lambrit, better known under his pseudonym of Geminus, engraved on copper a series of anatomical figures plagiarized from the _Fabrica_ and _Epitome_ of Vesalius. Geminus displayed the plates, which are of considerable artistic merit, indeed, the first of high quality to be produced in England, to King Henry VIII. That monarch, aware of the need of anatomical books to bolster the anatomical teaching now in progress, urged Geminus to publish his engravings. Never one to scorn the chance of gain, Geminus proceeded to follow this royal advice in the succeeding year (1545) and added to his plates a dedication to the king and the text of Vesalius’ _Epitome_.[44] For some peculiar reason the completely innocent John Caius has occasionally been blamed as the impetus to this plagiarized publication despite the fact that Geminus states plainly in his preface that Henry VIII was responsible for his decision to publish. While the illustrations plagiarized from Vesalius may have been of some pedagogical value, the text of the _Epitome_ certainly was no anatomical manual, and the fact that it was in Latin, which many if not most of the surgeons could not read, gave it even less value. It was perhaps at least partly for these reasons that Thomas Vicary appears to have issued in 1548 an anatomical text in English entitled _A Profitable Treatise of the Anatomie of Mans Body_. No copy of it is known to exist today, and its existence is realized only through mention of it on the title-page of an edition published in 1577 by the surgeons of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and a reference to it in 1565 by another surgeon, John Halle, who refers to Vicary as ‘the firste that euer wrote a treatyse of Anatomye in English (to the profite of his brethren chirurgiens and the helpe of younge studientes) as farre as I can learne’.[45] However, to refer to the ‘profite’ and ‘helpe’ to be obtained from Vicary’s treatise is to reveal the deplorable state of anatomical studies in England at the time and to cause one to wonder if Halle had read by way of contrast the continental writings of that period. It seems very likely that what has been termed Vicary’s anatomy was nothing other than a copy of a manuscript, presently in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library in London, dated 1392 and merely a compilation of Lanfranc, Henri de Mondeville, and Gui de Chauliac, the most recent of them dead in 1367. Thus not only was Vicary’s work not based upon dissection, except for a secondhand account of crude fourteenth-century autopsy, but it represented a definite case of retrogression.