One of the most emotive pieces of medicine's historical apocrypha places Dr. Thomas Linacre during the summer of 1499 on top of Little St. Bernard Pass. He is on his way home to England, but while looking wistfully back towards Italy he reverently builds a votive altar to his academic Sancta Mater. On turning his steps north he passes into history as England's premier physician and "restorer of learning," a reputation which he was about to earn and which is still maintained almost five centuries later.' Linacre was near the end of a full and busy life when Catherine of Aragon, in 1523, appointed him to be Princess Mary's tutor. He had been instrumental in the foundation of the Royal College of Physicians and was its first president. His monumental translations of Galen were coming off the press and receiving European a~c l a i m .~ Catherine was aware that her appointee, even though England's greatest living scholar, was hardly the most appropriate choice but she probably saw it as a comfortable sinecure for one of her first English friends. It was asking too much of one who had tutored her first husband, more than 20 years earlier, to bridge the generation gap and take on the routine Latin instruction of her seven-year old daughter. In looking around for a younger man to shoulder the day-today harassments of being a l royal tutor Catherine chose the young highly articulate Spanish humanist, Juan Luis V i~e s .~ Perhaps her choice was made from a lingering nostalgia for the Spanish intellectuality of her childhood, though officially it was done on the recommendation of Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More. Juan Luis was pleased to accept the English court appointment. It allowed him to be associated academically with Dr. Linacre. It pro