![]() ![]() While much of the western world lost touch with the classical past, Islamic scholars collected and translated the works of Hippocrates and Galen – among many others – and absorbed and synthesized the ancient theories with new discoveries of their own. Despite advances in medical scholarship, Quranic injunctions against human dissection and human representation in drawing placed severe limitations on the critical and accurate analysis of human anatomy. Later in the Medieval period, the resurgence of Europe led to the establishment of universities and the retranslation of classical works into Greek and Latin. In the fourteenth century, some rare human dissections were carried out at European medical schools, ordinarily with the anatomist seated on a dais at the head of a large room, reading from a manuscript of Galen, while a demonstrator opened the body, surrounded by students and other scholars. The West owes a great debt to the Arab civilization which conquered the Byzantine successors of Ancient Rome. This anatomical demonstration shows the professor in full robes overseeing a dissection and an assistant poised to make his incision. Although the great Roman physician Celsus, of the first century AD, and Galen, of the second, both refer to Alexandrian scholarship, the resurgent taboo on human dissection coupled with the loss of the text On Anatomy allowed descriptions of human anatomy presented as fact to slip back into the untested – and largely incorrect – domain of theory. With the conquest of Alexandria by Rome, a significant detriment to the advance of medicine occurred in the reversal of the cultural climate favorable to human dissections. It seems probable that such thorough examinations must have been accompanied by drawings, though none have survived, and none of the classical works existing in transcription mention Hellenistic anatomical drawings. One of these physician-scholars was Herophilus, who produced the treatise On Anatomy, synthesizing the results of many hundred human dissections. The availability of the Corpus in the stimulating intellectual environment of Hellenistic Alexandria likely inspired medical scholars finally to take up the knife and undertake systematic human anatomical studies for the first time in classical history. Shown here is the dissection of a swine with more animals being bundled in on the right. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a revival of interest in Galen’s work resulted in Latin translations illustrated by imaginary scenes. ![]() The Hippocratic Corpus catalogued in Alexandria’s renowned library was a collection of works by Hippocrates himself and successor physicians practicing at his school on the eastern Aegean island of Kos. Scholars and students of many disciplines congregated there and examined both Aristotle’s comparative anatomical studies and the works of Hippocrates. ![]() The Greek project found perhaps its greatest expression in the Library of Alexandria, in the city Alexander established on the Nile delta. he made Greek intellectual achievements a dominant force in the civilized world. Among Aristotle’s many students was the young Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon, and when Alexander earned the epithet “the Great” by conquering a vast territory in the third century B.C. In this important work lay the foundations for comparative anatomy, still it proved inadequate to explain the particularities of the human body. Aristotle, the famous natural philosopher two generations younger than Hippocrates, also considered anatomical study critical to medical knowledge and practice, but he developed theories of human anatomy based only on exterior physical examination and the dissection of animals. 33) Certainly no faculty member of a modern medical school would contradict the ancient master on this point, yet for many centuries – indeed for millennia – anatomical study had a distinctly uneasy relationship with medical education and practice. “ Anatomy is the foundation of medicine,” the classical Greek physician Hippocrates declared, “and should be based on the form of the human body.”(Persaud, p. Traditional portrait-bust of Hippocrates Lint, p. ![]()
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