The Paduan School was close to Venice and associated with it, so that the young student had probably many opportunities of going to and fro.

On the sixth of December, 1537, before he had reached his twenty-fourth year and shortly after taking his degree, he was elected to the chair of surgery and anatomy at Padua.
The task Vesalius set himself to accomplish was to give an accurate description of all the parts of the human body, with proper illustrations.

He must have had abundant material, more, probably, than any teacher before him had ever had at his disposal.

We do not know where he conducted his dissections, as the old amphitheatre has disappeared, but it must have been very different from the tiny one put up by his successor, Fabricius, in 1594.

Possibly it was only a temporary building, for he says in the second edition of the "Fabrica" that he had a splendid lecture theatre which accommodated more than five hundred spectators (p.