In 1537, another pilgrim was working in Venice waiting to be joined by his six disciples.

After long years of probation, Ignatius Loyola was ready to start on the conquest of a very different world.

Devoted to the sick and to the poor, he attached himself to the Theatiner Order, and in the wards of the hospital and the quadrangle, the fiery, dark-eyed, little Basque must frequently have come into contact with the sturdy young Belgian, busy with his clinical studies and his anatomy.

Both were to achieve phenomenal success--the one in a few years to revolutionize anatomy, the other within twenty years to be the controller of universities, the counsellor of kings, and the founder of the most famous order in the Roman Catholic Church.

It was in this hospital that Vesalius made observations on the China-root, on which he published a monograph in 1546.