Nick Ajhar

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We see science and especially the fields of medicine and
anatomy to rely heavily on modern technology and new discoveries
through said technology. What I wanted to look at and delve into was
how the people of old, our ancient and medieval ancestors, viewed this
study of medicine and anatomy. How did our ancestors come upon
their medical findings and why did they think what they did? How did
figures like Galen, Avicenna, Leonardo, and Paracelsus influence
modern thought even without modern technology? This history of
medicinal understanding is helpful to realize how medicine progressed
and how not everything was discovered so recently.
As long has we have been around, humans have tried to discover
what happens inside our bodies and how it came to be this way. At the
earliest points in medicine most cultures believed that all sickness and
suffering was caused by evil spirits, a belief which would stick around
for a lot longer than most. One remedy for this, that we have evidence
for, was called trepanation. This is the act of drilling holes in the skull
to relieve some of the ailments housed in the head. Such primitive
methods seem a far cry from modern medicine, but it lasted well into
the middle ages and is still practiced scarcely today. It is interesting to
note the longevity of some of the earliest treatments. Another example
of an ancient practiced that persisted over a vast period of time was
mummification and the use of mummy, which is a finely ground
substance made of other mummies. Mummification is one of the more
publicized forms of ancient medicine, but although it is commonly
linked to Egypt, where it is thought to have originated, mummies have
been found all throughout the world. As frivolous as mummification
seems, it actually got started the atmosphere of bodily research in
ancient Egypt. As embalming bodies often involved making cuts in the
body and removing organs, the Egyptians got to know a good bit about
the human physiology. This research was only furthered when the
Ptolemaic pharaohs gave Greek practitioners the ability to dissect
bodies to study our anatomy. Dissection for scientific reasons will be
one of the greatest ways that scientists come to understand how the
human body functioned.
In mentioning the history of medicine there is no way to simply
skip over the Greeks. Many things still persist from the Greek medical
culture today; for example, the snake wound around a staff is still the
symbol of medicine today as it was in their own culture. Similarly, all
doctors today must take the Hippocratic oath, descended form the
great Greek physician Hippocrates. Greece sparked many new changes
in the understanding of medicine. One of the first and most significant
changes was that in studying medicine they tried to separate it as
much from religion as possible. The Greeks did not believe that
ailments were due to ones sinfulness or caused by the gods, rather
they thought it was a matter of something wrong in ones surroundings

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and a balance of something called the four humors. Early treatments
in Greek medicine included combinations of wine and vinegar as well
as plants and minerals form the earth, which were antiseptics. The use
of alcohol as an impromptu antiseptic can be seen all throughout
history, and has been popularized as a trope of war by Hollywood films.
The Greeks also practiced a commonly known treatment known as
bloodletting, which was used well throughout the Middle Ages as a go
to. In contrast to the more primitive methods were the ideas of the
Greek philosophers of Alexandria. Herophilus and Erasistratus were two
of the first physicians, under the previously referenced Ptolemaic
pharaohs, to dissect bodies purely for research. They disproved the
Egyptian and Aristotelian theory that the heart was the center of
intelligence, and showed that it was truly the brain. These early
students of scientific medicine led the way for the next generation of
influential Greeks, like Celsus, and especially Galen.
Galens influence stretches well into the 17th century and he was
widely regarded as the basis of all medical subjects for just as long.
Galen is also a good marker to show the branching off of Eastern and
Western medicine, as Galen would be the indubitable father of the
latter while the former would take its own path. One of the main
principles of Galens research was that he was a philosopher as well as
a researcher and that one was not a good physician without the
philosophy. This idea of combining philosophy and medicine can also
be seen in the practice of empiricism in the Enlightenment era. To
Galen, the understanding of the body had to come before treating
illnesses and not vice versa. Galens ideas were nothing short of
revolutionary, he touched on almost every sphere of understanding
within the body. With a few misconceptions, many of his basic findings
hold true today. One of Galens greater and more modern contributions
was his great understanding of how the heart and circulatory system
functioned. Galen, with the help of his ancestors such as Erasistratus,
discovered that the blood circulated in one loop with the blood initially
leaving the heart through arteries, which were thicker, and reentering
through veins, which were thinner. He also identified that the lungs
were connected to the function of the heart, saying that it cooled the
heart. Today we know that the lungs work to resupply oxygen lost in
powering the body. Another contribution was that he expanded on the
nervous system discovered by Erasistratus and showed that ailments
could be treated not by looking directly at the location of the ailment,
but by tracking its sources. In one of his writings Galen talks about how
he healed a friend who suffered from numbness and paralysis in his
hand. Instead of applying treatment to the hand Galen gathered that if
he worked on the spine, to which the function of the hand was routed
then he could solve the problem, which he did. Even thousands of
years ago when Galen practiced his medicine there were

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breakthroughs being made without technology. Through simple
observation he was able to discern many things that hold true in the
modern era. There are numerous other important contributions, as his
final word count across his works reaches the multi-millions, but it is
most important to know that Galen is one of the most prominent
contributors to modern physiological thought and his works are some
of the best preserved from his era.
As the works of many early Europeans after Galen were lost, we
look to the Middle East in search of some answers as Galens
contemporaries in this region have works that were not lost and
continue to show the development of understanding. While Galen
made large strides towards empiricism and understanding medicine
apart from spirituality, the Persians beliefs were firmly rooted in myths
and cultural stories passed down through generations. Although many
of their beliefs are inconsistent with Galen, they did believe in the
humoral system, or the belief that the healthy body had a balance of
the our humors. Some even think that it originated in the Middle East
and was adopted by the Greeks. Since theyre mythological
background points to wine being created by the blood of a holy cow,
they believed that it was related, in a way, to blood and treating
diseases of the blood. It is because of this that wine was used as a
treatment for keeping blood in a healthy condition. One thing that we
do see that is correct in Persian medicine was the concept of
fertilization. Unlike the Greeks and other contemporary civilizations the
Persians correctly believed that a being requires a male and female
gamete to form a zygote and produce offspring. Although the Middle
Eastern culture may have been behind on some things, they too had
their own advancements in medicine despite much of it still being
grounded in myth. After this era though, in the time of Islam, we see
the rise of philosophy science as was championed by Galen and
modern physicians.
As we work our way back into the Middle Ages and the Western
world we see that the Catholic Church had taken control of all scientific
ideas and efforts, setting the study far behind where it had been. They
again labeled the cause of disease as sin and punishment by God for
wicked deeds, and that was once again accepted. Although they were
still constrained to these beliefs they still held on to many of the ideas
of Galen, such as the four humors and the power of observation.
Medieval doctors relied heavily on taking pulses and examining urine
through flasks, so they had some of their diagnoses rooted in
empiricism even if the background for the knowledge was not.
Although Galen had an excellent grasp of other concepts, his complete
understanding of human anatomy was a bit flawed due to the fact that
he dissected mainly animals; this flawed understanding was passed on
to the Middle Ages. One of the greatest examples of how little the

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people of the medieval age knew about medicine is seen during the
Black Plague. When this disease ravaged Europe in the 1340s, the
church wrote it off as Gods punishment for mankinds sinful ways. It is
partly because of this that little was done to prevent this horrible
plague. All that people could do was pray to God and to saints that
their sins, and diseases, would be absolved. Similarly, in the case of
things such as epilepsy, the church would declare that sufferers were
possessed and only could be treated through religious cures
(Diamantis, Sidiropoulou, and Magiorkinis, 1).
As Europe is in the midst of their unenlightened era in the Middle
Ages, the Islamic world would receive a Golden age, as they had many
prospering nations (Hajar, Air of History Part III, 44). A lot of the
knowledge was obtained for the exact reason that knowledge was
being suppressed in Europe, the Islamic scientists and Caliphs had
promoted scientific understanding and encouraged the separation of
these ideas and religious ideas. One Islamic mind with an advanced
grasp on medicinal topics was Al-Razi whose diagnoses and ideas
about cleanliness were far ahead of his time. For example, he gathered
that a fever was not a sin, nor was it an illness all of its own, but that it
was a symptom of a further illness. His books and treatises were
reprinted throughout medieval Europe and even up until the 19th
century. Al-Razi is responsible for another great thing that would
become a cornerstone of learning in the Enlightenment era, and also
something that medieval Europeans were not doing, which was
challenging the ancient thinkers. Al-Razi promotes the idea that their
ideas were great and revolutionary, but new revolutions must happen
and conclusions must be continually challenged to confirm them, or to
disprove them and attain further truth (Hajar, Air of History Part IV,
94-95). Today we see that challenging our predecessors is a key part of
progress and confirming certain scientific beliefs; these ideas are ones
that tie to the current scientific method. Islamic medicine during this
area only becomes more and more sophisticated and the learners of
the Renaissance will take much away from it in their attainment of
knowledge.
Another Islamic thinker active in the Islamic world was Ibn Sina,
or Avicenna, as he is known in the west. Avicenna is widely regarded as
the most famous Islamic scientist of his era and he had great influence
over the subsequent generations ideas on medicine. He not only
advanced the thoughts on medicine in the Middle East, but he even
expanded upon Galens theories and had influences on Western
thought. For example, he corrected Galens ideas on pulsology and
correctly said that there was one pulse for the entirety of the body
rather than one for each individual organ, as Galen believed. Avicenna
writes a lot of things on heart disease and there may be large room to
critique, but in the context of the 11th century, his findings are

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groundbreaking and well before his time. He touches on things such as
atherosclerosis, palpitations, syncope, and many other things that
modern medicine has sorted out rather recently with synthetic drugs.
Avicenna notes in an additional piece of work that he has discovered a
drug, which can put the heart at ease. The fact that he was able to
discover this drug is astounding. His Canon of Medicine was held as
one of the standard texts of medicine and anatomy for a large amount
of time after his lifespan and it made headway into Middle Age and
Renaissance culture.
The only way that Europe had a chance of breaking out of the
control of the ancient thinkers and of the churches control was to
experience a radical change, a rebirth of thought and research. This
period in Europe would occur and it was known as the Renaissance.
The Renaissance is known widely for its contributions to art and a
flourishing western world, but during this time the field of medicine
was also changing. As the Islamic thinkers believed, one must
challenge traditional beliefs in order to further ones understanding,
and a man named Paracelsus would do just this. Paracelsus ejected
almost all of the traditional physicians, including Galen and Avicenna.
He believed in the idea of Alchemy and believed that inside of each
living being there was an alchemist to convert food into useful things
for the body (Guggenheim, 1189). This new generation of scientists
challenged what had long been read in books and compared it to what
they could observe. As wild as Paracelsuss ideas may sound, he
strongly advocated learning from natural observation, so strongly that
he instructed many of his students to abandon book learning and only
trust what they could see and test (Guggenheim, 1192). Paracelsus
never truly separated the ideas of observational studies and the laws
of magic and other unobservable ideas, which hindered his influence,
but his rejection of what had been established and unchallenged
cannot be taken lightly. It is this same spirit of skepticism, which
influences discovery even today.
As the Renaissance pushed on, Europe advanced their thoughts,
but were still trapped under the rule of the Roman Catholic Church. The
threat of the Inquisition hindered many discoveries, especially in the
field of anatomy and physiology as human dissection was considered
against the church (Sherzoi, 131). As Vesalius studied bodies in secret,
he too countered many of Galens points. Vesalius mainly had the
chance to study the musculoskeletal system during his dissections, but
even this was controversial. He showed the similarity of tendons and
ligaments and that nerve sizes did not correlate to the sizes of the
structures they inhabited, a counter to one of Galens ideas (Sherzoi,
132). Another contemporary of Vesalius who is slightly better known is
Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vincis work would not be discovered until much
later, so his contemporaries knew nothing of it, but we see that his

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understanding was furthered through his dissections and hands on
work, just as Paracelsus thought necessary (Guggenheim, 1191).
Leonardo studied the body to further understand how it could be
illustrated, but nevertheless he was dedicated to discovering its
mysteries. His incredibly detailed illustrations and ideas on numerous
topic, from nerves, to muscles, to the heart, were greatly utilized by
18th and 19th century surgeons to further understand the organs and
bodies they operated on (Toldeo-Pereyra, Leonardo da Vinci: The
Hidden Father of Anatomy, 247-248). Through this Renaissance era
we see that the ideas were evolving and becoming much more devoted
to ones own observation rather than word of mouth and passed down
knowledge. Until the invention of further technology and the discovery
of the unseen, medical understanding could not come much farther.
We see that as we move from ancient to the beginning of the
modern era of medicine that empiricism and unique observation begins
to become king. It seems that through the use of a few individuals as
vessels for discovery mankind evolved their understanding about the
human body and about scientific thought entirely. As our
understanding of the body and its functions moves farther away from
magic, otherworldly explanations, and outdated knowledge that has
been passed down, our understanding becomes more complete.