Greek Biology and Greek Medicine

BOOK REVIEWS Greek Biology and Greek Medicine. By Charles est investigators of living nature.” Singer Singer. Chapters in the History of Science. Gen quotes Muller’s studies on the embryology eral Editor Charles Singer, i. Oxford Univ. 1922. of the dogfish, made in 1840, which abso In this unpretentious little volume there lutely confirmed the observations of Aristotle is presented a most valuable study of the made two thousand years before. evolution of biology and medicine among The mode of reproduction of the cephalo the Greeks from the commencement of pods was quite accurately described by such studies down to the latest evidences Aristotle but his description was not gener of Greek influence in them. The remains of ally accepted nor was it confirmed until early Greek art dating from the seventh the nineteenth century. Singer quotes some and sixth century b.c. show “a closeness of Aristotle’s wonderfully vivid descriptions of observation of animal forms that tells of a of the somewhat obscure anatomy and people awake to the study of nature.” The physiology of marine animals. so-called Coan classificatory system a some Aristotle’s pupil and successor, Theo what crude classification of animals con phrastus (372-287 b.c.) may be justly tained in the work “On Regimen,” in the regarded as the founder of botanical science. Hippocratic Collection, dated the fifth As there was until the seventeenth century century b.c. “shows a close and accurate no adequate system of the classification of study of animal forms, a study that may be plants Theophrastus and his successors until justly called scientific.” The author pro that era had to content themselves with ceeds to quote a number of physiological descriptions of the individual plants accom and embryological studies and observations panied by pictorial representations. Those from the works of the Hippocratic physi contained in the works of Theophrastus are cians which are indicative of the really most accurate and valuable. He also made scientific methods used by them in their some very estimable efforts to elucidate the researches. There is a splendid description mystery of germination. of the contributions to the biology of With the death of Theophrastus, Greek Aristotle in which Singer demonstrates biology entered into its period of darkness the value which modern scientists attach only slightly brightened by the works of to them. While Aristotle’s writings on phys Pliny and Dioscorides in the first century ics exerted an enormous interest and gov of the Christian era, and once brilliantly erned the views of writers on physical illuminated by the works of Galen in the science for some two thousand years, they second century. The whole knowledge pos have fallen in esteem since the discoveries sessed by the world in the department of of Galileo. On the other hand the biological physiology from the third to the seven works of Aristotle which were not much teenth century, nearly all the biological regarded during the middle ages, are now conceptions till the thirteenth, and most of held in the greatest estimation: “From the anatomy and much of the botany until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the sixteenth century, all the ideas of the and especially as a result of the work of physical structure of living things through Cuvier, Richard Owen and Johannes Muller, out the Middle Ages, was contained in a Aristotle’s reputation as a naturalist has small number of these works of Galen. As risen steadily, and he is now universally Galen’s dissections were not made on the admitted to have been one of the very great body of man but on those of Barbary apes, dogs, cats, pigs, and other animals he made Hippocratic collection. The many quota innumerable errors because he ascribed to tions which he gives convey a fine idea of the human body the anatomical conditions the great value of these writings and he found in animals. Thus there is no rcte inspire a regretful reflection that they are mirabile such as he describes in the human so unfamiliar to most practitioners of medi brain though such an organ is found in the cine in our own time. The concluding sen calf. The human being has no hepatic tence of the book is well worth quoting for vein but the dog has. It was not until the its truthful summing up of the situation. Renaissance that anatomists such as Vesa The texts of Hippocrates and Galen have now lius realized the errors of those others ceased to occupy a place in any medical cur that were heretofore so highly regarded. riculum. Yet all who know these writings, When Vesalius and his colleagues and know too, not only that their spirit is still with followers began the actual dissection of the us, but that the works themselves form the human body they soon realized that Galen background of modern practice, and that had foisted upon it the structures apper their very phraseology is still in use at the taining to animals which were not human. bedside. Modern medicine may be truly de In the sixteenth century men returned to scribed as in essence a creation of the Greeks. To realize the nature of our medical system, the methods which had been taught by the some knowledge of its Greek sources is essential. great Greek masters, especially Aristotle, It would indeed be a bad day for medicine if and with this very return to his methods ever this debt to the Greeks were forgotten, they discovered and corrected the errors and the loss would be at least as much ethical in the works of the Master, which had been as intellectual. But there is happily no fear of slavishly copied throughout hundreds of this, for the figure and spirit of Hippocrates years by men who, while they imagined are more real and living today than they have they glorified thereby, were in reality but been since the great collapse of the Greek propagating his mistakes. With Vesalius scientific intellect in the third and fourth and with Fabricius ab Aquapendente and centuries of the Christian era. his even greater pupil, William Harvey, Francis R. Packard. modern physiology and anatomy began, both based on direct observation which Aristotle had practiced and inculcated but from which his followers had departed. To the Greeks alone belongs the distinc tion “that they practiced a system of medi cine based not on theory but on observation accumulated systematically as time went on.” The anatomists and physiologists who at the revival of learning found the pure fountains of Greek medicine in their hands may have been to blame for slavishly submitting to the masters of antiquity, but when the revolt against this submission arose among their successors, the revolution aries were as a matter of fact actually returning to the original methods of the ancient masters. Singer gives a most lucid description of the schools of Cnidus and Cos and a very excellent resume of the contents of the .

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