The earliest studies

In ancient Greece learned men knew something about the dissection of animals. Dissection is the cutting up of bodies in order to learn how they are made. But the early Greek doctors knew very little about human anatomy. One of the most famous Greek doctors was a man named Hippocrates.

He lived about 2,500 years ago. He was the first one to write about anatomy, and to treat it as a science. He made a skeleton of brass to show something about the bones of the body. A Greek philosopher named Aristotle also wrote about anatomy, although he admitted that he knew little about the parts of the human body. The first really important name in anatomy is that of Erasistratus. He was a Greek doctor who lived about two hundred years after Hippocrates. Erasistratus was the first to dissect human bodies. He lived in Alexandria, Egypt, the great centre of knowledge at that time. The Egyptian king gave Erasistratus permission to dissect the bodies of criminals. In this way Erasistratus was able to find out more about the human body than anyone who had lived before him.

 He wrote about the parts of the body and described them. His writings are lost to us, but some of them have been mentioned in the writings of another man, named Galen, a Greek physician who lived almost two thousand years ago. Galen moved to Rome, where he did much work in anatomy, and wrote at great length on the subject. He worked under a great handicap. The Romans had a law forbidding the use of dead bodies for dissection. Galen sometimes broke the law in secret, but most of his dissection was done on apes After Galen, nothing important was done in anatomy for several hundred years. The Roman Empire collapsed and Europe went into the Dark Ages. During this time, the Arabs were the most learned people. They had conquered North Africa and the European lands around the Mediterranean Sea.

The Arabs were great scientists and mathematicians, but they contributed almost nothing to the science of anatomy. It is against the Mohammedan religion to touch dead bodies, and so the Arab scientists could not study anatomy. About seven hundred years ago, several several Italian universities started courses in anatomy. Soon scientists from all over Europe came to Italy to study the subject. They studied what Galen had written about the human body, and very little else. Very little progress was made until about three hundred years later, in the 16th century. Then we come to a great name in the science of anatomy. The name is Andreas Vesalius.