n8 Greek Medicine 



He described correctly the action of the epiglottis in preventing 

 the entrance of food and drink into the windpipe during the 

 act of swallowing, he saw the lacteal vessels in the mesentery, 

 and pursued further the anatomy of the brain. He improved 

 on the anatomy of the heart, and described the auriculo- 

 ventricular valves and their mode of closure. He distinguished 

 clearly the motor and sensory nerves. He seems to have 

 adopted a definitely experimental attitude a very rare thing 

 among ancient physicians and a description of an experiment 

 made by him has recently been recovered. ' If ', he says, ' you 

 take an animal, a bird, for example, and keep it for a time in 

 a jar without giving it food and then weigh it together with 

 its excreta you will find that there is a considerable loss of 

 weight.' l The experiment is a simple one, but it was about 

 nineteen hundred years before a modern professor, Sanctorio 

 Santorio (1561-1636), thought of repeating it. 2 



The anatomical advances made by the Alexandrian school 







naturally reacted on surgical efficiency. The improvement 

 so effected may be gathered, for instance, from an account 

 of the anatomical relationships in certain cases of dislocation 

 of the hip given by the Alexandrian surgeon Hegetor, who 

 lived about 100 B. c. In his book Tre/n cuYtoh', On causes [of 

 disease],\\.Q asks * why (certain surgeons) do not seek another 

 way of reducing a luxation of the hip. ... If the joints of the 

 jaw, shoulder, elbow, knee, finger, &c. ? can be replaced, the 

 same, they think, must be true of all parts, nor can they give an 

 account of why the femur cannot be put back into its place. . . . 

 They might have known, however, that from the head of the 

 femur arises a ligament which is inserted into the socket of 



1 The quotation is from chapter xxxiii, line 44 of the Anonymus 

 Londinensis. H. Diels, Anonymus Londinensis in the Supplementum 

 Aristotelicum, vol. iii, pars i, Berlin, 1893. 



2 Sanctorio Santorio, Oratio in archilyceo patavino anno 1612 babita; dc 

 medicina statica aphorismi, Venice, 1614. 



