He contented himself with saying that he left the question regarding the existence of such a bone to the theologians.

He could not lie; he did not wish to fight the Inquisition; and thus he fell under suspicion.
The strength of this theological point may be judged from the fact that no less eminent a surgeon than Riolan consulted the executioner to find out whether, when he burned a criminal, all the parts were consumed; and only then was the answer received which fatally undermined this superstition.

Yet, in 1689 we find it still lingering in France, stimulating opposition in the Church to dissection.

Even as late as the eighteenth century, Bernouilli having shown that the living human body constantly undergoes a series of changes, so that all its particles are renewed in a given number of years, so much ill feeling was drawn upon him, from theologians, who saw in this statement danger to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, that for the sake of peace he struck out his argument on this subject from his collected works.( 320) (320) For permissions to dissect the human subject, given here and there during the Middle Ages, see Roth's Andreas Vesalius, Berlin, 1892, pp.
3, 13 et seq.

For religious antipathies as a factor in the persecution of Vesalius, see the biographies by Boerhaave and Albinos, 1725; Burggraeve's Etudes, 1841; also Haeser, Kingsley, and the latest and most thorough of all, Roth, as above.