5o8 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



more deserved because, from Galen to Vesalius — a stretch of nearly 

 fourteen hundred years — knowledge of anatomy was not advanced. 



Galen (131-201 a.d.), a Greek, working in Eome, followed the 

 traditions of the Alexandrian school in which he had been educated. 

 He dissected freely a variety of animals, including, it is recorded, an 

 elephant. It is, however, as an experimental physiologist that he 

 brought new light to medicine. He supported the statements of the 

 Alexandrian school, that nerves had motor and sensory functions, elab- 

 orated the theory of the control of muscles by nerves, and of the brain 

 as the center of the nervous system, and, more important still, sup- 

 ported these convictions by well-planned ingenious experiments. His 

 experiments on the brain and cord constitute the first experimental 

 study of the cause of paralysis, and he thereby became cognizant of the 

 fact that injury to one side of the brain affects the opposite side of the 

 body. He established, again by experiment, that urine is secreted by 

 the kidneys, and propounded the theory that the blood goes to the kid- 

 neys in order that the watery part may be filtered off. He studied the 

 heart and its movements, recognized the fetal nature of the foramen 

 ovale and the ductus arteriosus, wrote of aneurysm and practised the 

 ligation of arteries. 



Galen is the link between Hippocrates and Alexandrian anatomy,, 

 on the one hand, and Vesalius and Harvey, on the other. 



"With his death and the passing of his immediate successors progress lan- 

 guished and expired, for the ancient world was dying and was bearing down 

 with it the humaner arts. . . . For generations it seemed that the church alone 

 had survived . . . cherishing ignorantly often, but jealously and fiercely, the 

 records of a past science. (Mumford.) 



The intellectual world of Eome, Alexandria and Constantinople was 

 busied with theological controversies. The church became the arbiter 

 of all knowledge and demanded that all science must conform to the 

 Scriptures. Moral and intellectual progress became impossible. The 

 political world survived the invasion of the barbarians, but the intel- 

 lectual world was dying of dogma. For hundreds of years it was " first 

 the soldier; second the priest; third the lawyer; fourth the merchant; 

 fifth the physician ; and then after a long interval the surgeon, ranking 

 with the humblest of craftsmen." (Mumford.) 



Nearly fourteen centuries pass after Galen before we can again take 

 up the thread of progress. In these centuries — lost to science gen- 

 erally — the history of medicine shows but one isolated period of effort 

 worthy of mention. This is that period represented by the Arabian 

 school founded after the Mahommedan conquest and at its best from 

 the ninth to twelfth centuries. This school represents no progress in 

 anatomy, physiology or the general theory of medicine (which is to be 

 explained by the fact that the religion of the Mussulman considers 

 contact with a corpse sacrilege and thus debars dissection), but the 



