Anatomical inferences without dissection continued in Greece with Hippocrates (ca. 460-377 B.C ), who is known as the Father of Medicine. (Many medical students still take the Hippocratic Oath upon graduation from medical school.) He might also be called the Father of Holistic Medicine, since he advocated the importance of the relationship between patient, physician, and disease in title diagnosis and treatment of illness. This philosophy was rejected at a time when diseases were still thought to be punishments from the gods.

Hippocrates' knowledge of internal anatomy was severely limited by the lack of dissections, and not until Aristotle (384-322 B.C) did physicians begin to dissect animals carefully enough to deduce even the barest essentials of human anatomy. Aristotle corrected many of the anatomical errors of his predecessors, but because he was primarily a philosopher rather than a physician, he depended more on logical deduction than on observation and experimentation. His scanty knowledge of the inner workings of the human body led to many gross inaccuracies; for example, He believed that the brain cooled the heart by secreting "phlegm," and that the arteries contained only air. Nevertheless, he had an enormous influence on scientists for hundreds of years.

The Beginnings of Modern Anatomy

With the decline of Greek influence on the mainland, Alexandria became the transplanted center of Greek culture. It was there that the Greeks Herophilus (ca. 335-280 B.C) and Erasistratus (ca. 310-250 B.C) conducted the first systematic dissections of the human body. Herophilus established the brain as the center of intelligence, distinguished between veins and arteries, and made many other accurate observations about the structure of the human body, especially the nervous system. He conducted the first public dissection and is supposed to have taught the first female medical student. Erasistratus, an intense rival of Herophilus, was more interested in physiology than anatomy and studied the process of circulation in the body. He believed that pneuma, or vital air, was carried by the arteries. The written works of both Greeks were lost when the library at Alexandria was destroyed in A.D,272, but their ideas were found in the writings of the Roman Celsus (30 B.C.-A. D. 30) and the physician Claudius Galenus, popularly known as Galen.

Galen (ca. A.D 129-199), considered to be the greatest ancient physician after Hippocrates, was born in Pergamon in Asia Minor (now Pergama in Turkey). His early knowledge of anatomy derived from his studies in Asia Minor, Greece, and Alexandria, and after his return to Pergamon, his job as chief physician to the gladiators. Galen's dissections of African monkeys (human dissections were still forbidden) provided him with enough related information about humans so that he described correctly many brain structures, the structural differences between veins and arteries, and many other structures of the human body, including heart valves. He also observed that muscles contract in response to a stimulus from nerves, and demonstrated experimentally that the arteries carry blood, not air.

Despite Galen's improvements on earlier anatomical studies and his other achievements, he is often remembered for the fact that the Catholic church did not allow his ideas to be criticized; thus many of his erroneous ideas were perpetuated and major progress in the field of anatomy was halted until the sixteenth century.

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