Alcmaeon of Croton

By the middle of the fifth century BC there were three major centers Greek medical science: Croton (southern Italy), Agrigentum south coast Sicily) and Cos (island of Turkey).

The oldest of these medical centers was in Croton, and is most famous member was Alcmaeon.

Alcmaeon of Croton is the most important figure in the history of Greek medicine before Hippocrates. He was a Greek natural philosopher and physician significant for his theory of health and disease and for his investigations into the nature of the sense organs.

He was born in 510 BC and was a disciple of Pythagoras.

According to Chalcidius, Alcmaeon of Croton practices dissection and is said to have been the first man to make dissections. He was also the first to study the structure of the eye. He observed that the eye contained water. He also concluded that the eye contained light and that this light was necessary for vision

Alcmaeon of Croton was the first writer to champion the brain as the site of sensation and cognition.

He rejected earlier conceptions of disease as something possessing a separate existence of its own. He maintained that disease is due to the disturbance of the body’s natural equilibrium.
Alcmaeon of Croton

Medieval Treatises on the Body

Medieval Treatises on the Body
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, art and anatomy both experienced an awakening, fostered by legislative changes the decline of religious teaching and reactions to criminal violence or epidemic diseases.

Municipalities, especially in Italy, were pressured to permit dissection in order to determine cause of death in cases of murder of other unusual situations.

The rise of secular universities also contributed to the increase of dissection. In Christian tradition, the body was linked to sin and the temporal existence of the profane world.

Learning about its inner workings was not only unnecessary but it could jeopardize salvation, because the literal interpretation of Scripture anticipated the resurrection of the soul within an intact body.

As a result, the church did not condone dissection. Images of anatomic from the medieval period emphasize the barbarity of the act. Sometimes, the pope granted special dispensations for certain medical schools, such as Montpellier in southern France, but the subjects were executed criminals – or, on rape occasions, living criminals, who may have been sentenced to death by vivisection.

Legal dissections were ritualized and infrequent – once or twice a ear, for example; in some places, only once every five years. The professor sat high above the scene reading from a Latin edition of Galen.

The demonstrators were often illiterate barbers, who dissected in conjunction with lesson.

As a result, the words of Galen could persist unchallenged. Differences between the cadaver and a Galenic ideal were explained by the imperfection of the (usually criminal) mortal.
Medieval Treatises on the Body

Dissection and Anatomical ideas

Dissection and Anatomical ideas
The elaborate burial practices of the ancient Egyptians provided frequent opportunities for the observation of body parts.

Embalmers were adept at situating and extracting organs through tiny holes and slits in the body.

Egyptian graphic art may have been stylized, but the statuary reveals a sensitive appreciation of surface and underlying structure. Unlike the embalmers and artist, however the physicians do not appear to have used anatomy.

Our knowledge of ancient Egyptian medicine is based on a few surface papyri. Egyptian explanations of disease seem to have emphasized physiology, on which breath was the essence of life.

Blood vessels were hypothesized rather than known, and only a few organs were connected with specific functions. Some organs were associated with certain deities and used as hieroglyphics.

For instance, a stylized uterus, or sa, represented the goddess of childbirth. Because this symbol was bicornuate (had two horns), scholars think that the model may have been animal rather than human.

Ancient Greek sculpture reflects a preoccupation with the accurate portrayal of surface anatomy, with attention to the underlying muscles and bones.

Votive offerings left at temples by sick people hoping for cures were fashioned from clay or stone to resemble afflicted body parts – uterus, breasts, bladder and limbs – sometimes with anatomical derangements such as varicose veins.

Despite these artistic influences and their skill in observation, Greek doctors were not especially interested in anatomy. Dissection of human bodies was forbidden, and funeral practices centered on cremation.

Given the laws and funeral customs, few opportunities arose for examination of internal structure of humans. Exceptions are found in Hippocratic treaties on fractures and dislocation, which reveal extensive knowledge of bone and joints.

Illustration is essential to the teaching of anatomy, and the ban on dissection did not extend to animals. The fourth century BC philosopher and biologist Aristotle, appears to have used large diagrams when he taught the comparative anatomy of animals.

After about 300 BC the Greek city of Alexandra permitted dissection of the bodies of criminals, alive or dead. These public demonstration were designed to horrify as much as instruct.

That the practice was reserved for criminals indicates the social ambivalence regarding dissection, which could be seem as a desecration.

Two Alexandrians, Herophilus and Erasistratus, describe minute structures, including lymph lacteals, the meninges and vascular structures such as s torcular herophili.
Dissection and Anatomical ideas