1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

5
Medicine and Other Empirical Sciences
5.1 The Birth of Anatomy and Physiology
Among the medical schools of classical Greece the most famous was that page 161
founded in the fifth century B.C. by Hippocrates of Cos. It played an important
role in freeing medicine from magic and religious practices and in
founding medical ethics. But Hippocratic thinking remained in the realm
of , or professional medical practice, which it essentially founded; it
did not generate autonomous sciences (in our sense). The essential novelty
of Hellenistic medicine was the creation, in the first half of the third
century B.C., of anatomy and physiology based on the dissection of the
human body. This was done by Herophilus of Chalcedon, active in Alexandria,
and by Erasistratus of Ceos.
Again in this field, tradition favored the works still understandable in
the Middle Ages. Thus we have the works of the Hippocratic corpus and
those of Galen, from the imperial period, but all Hellenistic writings have
been lost; no treatise by Herophilus or Erasistratus exists. But from fragments
and testimonies it is possible to recover a certain fraction of their
results, enough for a qualitative evaluation. We are indebted to Heinrich
von Staden for a keen effort in reconstructing the results of Herophilus
of Chalcedon and his school, based on a critical analysis of all relevant
testimonies. 1
The picture that emerges is impressive. Human anatomy and physiology
under Herophilus appear “modern” in many ways. A lot of anatom-
1 [von Staden: H].
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