ABSTRACT
Medical supremacy passed to the French in the first part of the nineteenth century, later to rest with the Germans, at the time of the political and industrial ascendency of Germany. The progress of science in the early nineteenth century reveals numerous and determining factors — a circumstance that makes the history of the epoch unusually interesting and yet difficult to follow. The modern study of anatomy, begun with the epoch-making work of Vesalius, had continued through the eighteenth century to be limited to the gross anatomy of organs, muscles, and bones in their visible form. A leader in American anatomy was Caspar wistar, Professor of Anatomy at Pennsylvania, highly reputed teacher, and writer of the first American textbook on the subject. A further developmental factor was the progress in anatomy and pathology, which explains the supremacy of the French school.
