Paris. He quickly installed himself in the medical school at Louvain
(outside Brussels), and was soon scouting the locale for bodies. Outside
the walled city of Louvain, while searching for the bones of executed
criminals, Vesalius and a physician friend stumbled upon a cadaver,
hanging upon a gibbet (the upside-down L-shaped frame used to hang
criminals). He inspected the cadaver, concluding that the body had
initially been burned and roasted over a fire of straw, but had been “freed
of flesh” by the birds. Observing that the bones were now held together
only by the dried ligaments, he recalled:
Observing the body to be dry and nowhere moist or rotten, I
took advantage of this unexpected but welcome opportunity
and, with the help of [my friend], I climbed the stake and
pulled the femur away from the hipbone. Upon my tugging,
the scapulae with the arms and hands also came away,
although the fingers of one hand and both patellae as well as
one foot were missing. After I had surreptitiously brought the
legs and arms home in successive trips—leaving the head and
trunk behind—I allowed myself to be shut out of the city in
the evening so that I might obtain the thorax, which was held
securely by a chain. So great was my desire to possess those
bones that in the middle of the night, alone and in the midst of
all those corpses, I climbed the stake with considerable effort
and did not hesitate to snatch away that which I so desired.Vesalius finished cutting away the ligaments and soft tissues after
softening them with boiling water. He continued:
Finally and secretly I cooked all the bones to render them
more suitable for my purpose. When they had been cleansed I
constructed the skeleton that is preserved at Louvain.^22After a brief stint in Louvain, Vesalius was on his way to Padua, Italy,
home to the most distinguished medical school in the world, and it was at
the University of Padua where Vesalius would take his final examinations.
The almost four-hundred-year-old academic documents at the University