i-iO HISTORY OF PHYSIOLOGY. 



I have noticed these schools of medicine, because, though I am not 

 able to state distinctly their respective merits in the cultivation of 

 anatomy, a great progress in that science was undoubtedly made du- 

 ring their domination, of which the praise must, I conceive, be in 

 some way divided among them. The amount of this progress we are 

 able to estimate, when we come to the works of Galen, who flourished 

 under the Antonines, and died about A.D. 203. The following pass- 

 age from his works will show that this progress in knowledge was not 

 made without the usual condition of laborious and careful experiment, 

 while it implies the curious fact of such experiment being conducted 

 by means of family tradition and instruction, so as to give rise to a 

 caste of dissectors. In the opening of his Second Book On Anatomi- 

 cal Manipulations, he speaks thus of his predecessors : " I do not 

 blame the ancients, who did not write books on anatomical manipula- 

 tion ; though I praise Marinus, who did. For it was superfluous for 

 them to compose such records for themselves or others, while they 

 were, from their childhood, exercised by their parents in dissecting, 

 just as familiarly as in writing and reading; so that there was no 

 more fear of their forgetting their anatomy, than of forgetting their 

 alphabet. But when grown men, as well as children, were taught, 

 this thorough discipline fell off; and, the art being carried out of the 

 family of the Asclepiads, and declining by repeated transmission, 

 books became necessary for the student." 



That the general structure of the animal frame, as composed of 

 bones and muscles, was known with great accuracy before the time of 

 Galen, is manifest from the nature of the mistakes and deficiencies of 

 his predecessors which he finds it necessary to notice. Thus he ob- 

 serves, that some anatomists have made one muscle into two, from its 

 having two heads ; that they have overlooked some of the muscles 

 in the face of an ape, in consequence of not skinning the animal with 

 their own hands ; and the like. Such remarks imply that the cur- 

 rent knowledge of this kind was tolerably complete. Galen's own 

 views of the general mechanical structure of an animal are very clear 

 and sound. The skeleton, he observes, discharges 7 the office of the 

 pole of a tent, or the walls of a house. With respect to the action of 

 the muscles, his views were anatomically and mechanically correct ; 

 in some instances, he showed what this action was, by severing the 

 muscle.* He himself added considerably to the existing knowledge of 



De Anatoni. Administ. i. 2. * Sprengel, ii. 157. 



