"The beginning of modern medicine can then be dated to a day in 1536 when Vesalius, walking outside the city walls of Louvain, came across the body of an executed criminal chained to a gibbet. Only the bones remained, 'held together by the ligaments alone'. Vesalius at once made off with the arms and legs, but came back that night (defying the curfew) to climb the gibbet, smash the chain and carry of the trunk. Out of these parts he constructed his first skeleton - boiling them up secretly, and then pretending that he had brought them with him from Paris. 'I was burning with so great a desire to posses those bones,' wrote he seven years later, 'that I did not hesitate to snatch in the middle of the night that which I so desired'".