88 Greek Medicine 



which, suppressed as irrelevant in the Hippocratic works, 

 reappears in the Platonic and especially in the Neoplatonic 

 writings, and forms a very important dogma in later medicine. 



A pupil of Pythagoras and an older contemporary of 

 Empedocles was Alcmaeon of Croton (c. 500 B. c.), who began 

 to construct a positive basis for medical science by the practice 

 of dissection of animals, and discovered the optic nerves and 

 the Eustachian tubes. He even extended his researches to 

 Embryology, describing the head of the foetus as the first 

 part to be developed a justifiable deduction from appearances. 

 Alcmaeon introduced also the doctrine that health depends 

 on harmony, disease on discord of the elements within the 

 body. Curiosity as to the distribution of the vessels was 

 excited by Empedocles and Alcmaeon and led to further 

 dissection, and Alcmaeon's pupils Acron (c. 480 B. c.) and 

 Pausanias (c. 480 B. c.), and the later Philistion of Lokri, 1 the 

 contemporary of Plato, all made anatomical investigations. 



The views of Empedocles, and especially his doctrine that 

 regarded the heart as the main site of the pneuma, though 

 rejected by the Coan school as a whole, were not without 

 influence on Ionia. Diogenes of Apollonia, the philosopher of 

 pneumatism, a late fifth-century writer who must have been 

 contemporary with Hippocrates the Great, himself made an 

 investigation of the blood vessels ; and the influence of the 

 same school may be traced in a little work Trept Kapt?j5, On the 

 heart, which is the best anatomical treatise of the Hippocratic 

 Collection. This work describes the aorta and the pulmonary 

 artery as well as the three valves at the root of each of the 

 great vessels, and it speaks of experiments to test their validity. 

 It treats of the pericardium and of the pericardial fluid and 

 perhaps of the musculi papillares, and contrasts the thickness 

 of the walls of right and left ventricles. The author considers 



1 For the work of these physicians see especially M. Wellmann, Fragment- 

 sammlung der griechischen Aerzte, Bd. I, Berlin, 1901. 



