438 HISTORY OF PHYSIOLOGY. 



CHAPTER I. 



DISCOVERY OF THE ORGANS OF VOLUNTARY MOTION. 

 Sect. 1. Knowledge of Galen and his Predecessors. 



IN the earliest conceptions which men entertained of their power of 

 moving their ow-n members, they probably had no thought of any 

 mechanism or organization by which this was effected. The foot and 

 the hand, no less than the head, were seen to be endowed with life ; 

 and this pervading life seemed sufficiently to explain the power of 

 motion in each part of the frame, without its being held necessary tc 

 seek out a special seat of the will, or instruments by which its impulses 

 were made effective. But the slightest inspection of dissected animals 

 showed that their limbs were formed of a curious and complex collec- 

 tion of cordage, and communications of various kinds, running along 

 and connecting the bones of the skeleton. These cords and communi- 

 cations we now distinguish as muscles, nerves, veins, arteries, &c. ; and 

 among these, we assign to the muscles the office of moving the parts 

 to which they are attached, as cords move the parts of a machine. 

 Though this action of the muscles on the bones may now appear very 

 obvious, it was, probably, not at first discerned. It is observed that 

 Homer, who describes the wounds which are inflicted in his battles 

 with so much apparent anatomical precision, nowhere employs the word 

 muscle. And even Hippocrates of Cos, the most celebrated physician 

 of antiquity, is held to have had no distinct conception of such an 

 organ. 1 He always employs the word flesh when he means muscle, 

 and the first explanation of the latter word (^\Jg) occurs in a spurious 

 work ascribed to him. For nerves, sinews, ligaments, 2 he used indis- 

 criminately the same terms ; (rovoj or vsupov ;) and of these nerves (vsupcc) 

 he asserts that they contract the limbs. Nor do we find much more 

 distinctness on this subject even in Aristotle, a generation or two later. 

 " The origin of the vsupa," he says, 8 " is from the heart ; they connect 



1 Sprengel, Geschichte der Arzn'eikunde, i. 382. 



a Sprengel, Gesch. Arz. i. 385. 3 Hist. Anim. iii 5. 



