Vesalius's great-grandfather occupied the position of physician-in-ordinary to Marie of Burgundy, the wife of the German Emperor Maximilian I., the distinguished patron of letters in the Renaissance period. He lived to an advanced age as a professor of medicine at Louvain. {110} From this time on Vesalius's family always continued in official medical relation to the Austrian-Burgundy ruling family. His grandfather took his father's place as physician to Mary of Burgundy, and wrote a series of commentaries on the aphorisms of Hippocrates. Vesalius's father was the physician and apothecary to Charles V. for a while, and accompanied the Emperor on journeys and campaigns. What more natural than that his son, having reached the distinction of being the greatest medical scientist alive, should be offered, and as a matter of course accept the post of imperial physician! The simple facts of the matter are that Vesalius came down into Italy in order to study anatomy, because in that priest-ridden and ecclesiastically-ruled country he could get better opportunities for anatomical study and investigation than anywhere else in Europe. He spent ten years there and then wrote his classical work on anatomy. After that he spent some years applying anatomy to medicine. Then when he had come to be the acknowledged leader of the medical profession of the world, the Emperor Charles V., at that time the greatest ruler in Europe, asked him to become his court physician. Vesalius accepted, as would any other medical investigator that I have ever known, under the same circumstances. His position with Charles V. gave him opportunities to act as consultant for many of the most important personages of Europe, and it must not be forgotten that when the King of France was injured in a tournament Vesalius was summoned all the way from Madrid, and gave a bad prognosis in the case.