Since the beginning of the new year, a series of celebrations of the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Vesalius has taken place at various of the more important medical centers of the United States. There was to have been a magnificent memorial festival in Brussels, the birthplace of Vesalius, and an auxiliary celebration at Louvain, at whose university Vesalius obtained his preliminary and medical education. Owing to war conditions these celebrations were impossible, and it is interesting to realize that the great Flemish genius, to whom the world owes modern anatomy as it has developed for four centuries, had to look for the celebration of his quadricentenary to a country in the distant West discovered only about twenty-five years before his birth.