Harvey's case is a lively picture of what happened to Vesalius the century before in Italy, which we have already discussed at length in the chapter on the Golden Age of Anatomy. President White insists that this persecution was due to ecclesiastical opposition to dissection, but of this there is not a trace to be found. Dissection was carried on with perfect freedom at all of the Italian universities, though they were all under ecclesiastical influence, and in none was there more freedom than in the Papal University of Rome, at the {399} very time when Vesalius was doing his work in Northern Italy. At this time, too, Bologna was famous for its work in anatomy. Berengar of Carpi did a very large number of dissections, though Bologna was at the moment a Papal city and the University was directly under the Popes. It is clear, then, that the opposition to Vesalius arose entirely from the conservatism of fellow scientists in medicine, who thought that what had been taught for many hundreds of years in the universities, and had been accepted by men quite as good as Vesalius or any of their generation for over a thousand years, must surely be nearer absolute truth than what this young investigator wished them to accept. It is scarcely to be wondered that they resented, as men always do, what must have seemed the intrusive rashness of this young medical student, who was not yet thirty when he began to claim the right to teach his teachers, and who wanted to tell them that the medical world had all been wrong not only for many years, but for many centuries, and that he had been born to set them right. This is, after all, the attitude of mind which naturally develops in these cases, and it is no wonder that the old men use whatever means they have in their power to prevent rash young men from leading, as they think, the world astray.