On the heads of the anatomists and physicians were concentrated _all_ these missiles. The charge of atheism ripened into a proverb: "_Ubi sunt tres medici, ibi sunt duo athei_." Magic seemed so common a charge that many of the physicians seemed to believe it themselves. Mohammedanism and Averroism became almost synonymous with medicine, and Petrarch stigmatized Averroists as "men who deny Genesis and bark at Christ."[110] Not to weary you with the details of earlier struggles, I will select a great benefactor of mankind and champion of scientific truth at the period of the revival of learning and the Reformation--Andreas Vesalius, the founder of the modern science of anatomy. The battle waged by this man is one of the glories of our race. The old methods were soon exhausted by his early fervor, and he sought to advance science by truly scientific means--by patient investigation and by careful recording of results. From the outset Vesalius proved himself a master. In the search for real knowledge he braved the most terrible dangers. Before his time the dissection of the human subject was thought akin to sacrilege. Occasionally an anatomist, like Mundinus, had given some little display with such a subject; but, for the purposes of _investigation_, such dissection was forbidden.[111] As we have already seen, even such men in the early Church as Tertullian and St. Augustine held anatomy in abhorrence, and Boniface VIII. interdicted dissection as sacrilege. Through this sacred conventionalism Vesalius broke without fear. Braving ecclesiastical censure and popular fury, he studied his science by the only method that could give useful results. No peril daunted him. To secure the material for his investigations, he haunted gibbets and charnel-houses; in this search he risked alike the fires of the Inquisition and the virus of the plague. First of all men he began to place the science of human anatomy on its solid, modern foundations--on careful examination and observation of the human body. This was his first great sin, and it was soon aggravated by one considered even greater. Perhaps the most unfortunate thing that has ever been done for Christianity is the tying it to forms of science which are doomed and gradually sinking. Just as, in the time of Roger Bacon, excellent but mistaken men devoted all their energies to binding Christianity to Aristotle; just as, in the time of Reuchlin and Erasmus, they insisted on binding Christianity to Thomas Aquinas: so, in the time of Vesalius, such men made every effort to link Christianity to Galen.