The first and most important of the great Renaissance professors of anatomy of the Roman Medical School who were also Papal Physicians was Columbus. He had been Vesalius's assistant at Padua and later his successor. He had lectured also at Bologna. When a special effort was made to give prestige to the University of Pisa, he was tempted by particularly liberal offers to become the professor of anatomy in that city. It was from here, by still more generous patronage, that the Popes obtained him for their medical school. On treating of the Papal Medical School, we shall have more to say of him and his successor in the professorship of anatomy and medicine as well as in the post of Papal Physician, who was the third of the first anatomists of the time--Eustachius. He with Columbus and Vesalius constitute the trinity of great original investigators in anatomy about the middle of the sixteenth century. It is extremely interesting, with the traditions that exist in the matter, to find that the Popes secured two of these great anatomists for their personal physicians as well as for their medical school. The third one, Vesalius, became the body {217} physician first to the Emperor Charles V. and then to his son Philip II., whom many would declare to be as Catholic as the Popes themselves in religious tendencies. After Eustachius came Varolius, whose name is engraved in the history of medicine because the Pons Varolii or bridge of Varolius, an important structure in the brain now often simply called the pons, was named after him. To Varolius we owe one of the earliest detailed descriptions of the anatomy of the brain. He was the Papal Physician to Gregory XIII., who will be remembered as the Pope under whom the reform of the calendar was made by the great Jesuit mathematician and astronomer, Father Clavius. Pope Gregory's enlightened patronage of medicine in the person of Varolius will be better appreciated if we add that he was chosen as Papal Physician when he was not yet thirty years of age, though he had already given abundant evidence of his talent for original investigation in anatomy. He died at the early age of thirty-two, but not until after he had accomplished a life's work sufficient to give him an enduring place in the history of anatomy. After Varolius as Papal Physician came Piccolomini and then Caesalpinus, whom the Italians hail as the discoverer of the circulation of the blood before Harvey, and of whom we shall have much to say in the next chapter. Piccolomini was not as great an original thinker and worker as many of his predecessors and successors, but he was a man whose prestige in medicine was scarcely less than theirs.