0"T' LAERT> "! - USP

326 RECENT TIMES.
teaching power was accepted from any and every^ountry
Many Dutchmen and Germans were teachers Of anatomy
in Italian academies. At the suggestion of A. BENEDETTI *
an anatomical theatre was founded at Bologna in the year
1490. Similar institutions on the same plan arose also
later in Padua (1548), Amsterdam (1555) and at other
academies* A great drawback to the development of,,
anatomical teaching was occasioned by the scarcity of subjects,
a state of things which was only very gradually K
improved. Even VESALIUS declared that he had so seldom
had an opportunity of dissecting the uterus of a pregnant
woman that he was really quite ignorant of the differences
existing between it and the same organ in a similar condi- A
tion in the canine race.f As a student in Paris and afterwards
at Louvain he, with his companions, visited they
churchyards by night in order to dig up and collect humaff
bones; once he is said on such an expedition to have |
mounted the gallows and to have taken down the
- skeleton of the criminal who had been hanged there.:j.
It was the same in other places as well. FELIX
PLATTER narrates how he when a student at Mont-
' ,•'•>. pellier, along with friends,..among whom was a "daring
'% monk of the Augustine Monastery," dug up bodies
\\ Vby night in the churchyard "after having had a good
"fcdeep drink," and Clandestinely conveyed the bones into the
" ; 'town.§ Not only the students, however, but the professors. *
also, complained of the scarcity of subjects. RONDELET of
Montpellier is said for this reason to have even dissected the
body of his own son who hadtdied. It is further said of him
that when his colleague FONTANO was lying very ill he
begged to be allowed, after his death, to devote his body to
anatomical purposes. || Certainly in the statutes of the
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