SECTION 2 



EMBRYOLOGY FROM GALEN TO 

 THE RENAISSANCE 



2-1. Patristic, Talmudic, and Arabian Writers 



We are now at the beginning of the second century a.d. The next 

 thousand years can be passed over in as short a time as it has taken 

 to describe the embryology of Galen alone. The Patristic writers, 

 who on the whole were careful to base their psychology on the 

 physiology of the ancients, had little to say about the developing 

 embryo. Most of their interest in it was, as would naturally be 

 expected, theological; Tertullian, for instance, held that the soul was 

 present fully in the embryo throughout its intra-uterine life, thus 

 denying that kind of psychological recapitulation which had been 

 suggested by Aristotle. "Reply," he says in his De Anima, "O ye 

 Mothers, and say whether you do not feel the movements of the 

 child within you. How then can it have no soul? " These views were 

 not held by other Fathers, of whom St Augustine of Hippo {De 

 Immortalitate et de quantitate ahimae) may serve as a representative, for 

 he thought that the embryo was "besouled" in the second month 

 and "besexed" in the fourth. These various opinions were duly 

 reflected in the law, and abortion, which had even been recom- 

 mended theoretically by Plato and defended practically by Lysias 

 in the fourth or fifth century B.C., now became equivalent to homicide 

 and punishable by death. This fact leads Singer to the view that 

 the Hippocratic oath is late, perhaps early Christian. The late Roman 

 law, which, according to Spangenberg, regarded the foetus as not 

 ''Homo'", not even '' Infans'\ but only a ''Spes animantis'\ was 

 gradually replaced by a stern condemnation of all pre-natal infanti- 

 cide. "And we pay no attention", said the Bishops of the Quinisext 

 Council, held at Byzantium in 692, "to the subtle distinction as to 

 whether the foetus is formed or unformed." Other authorities, follow- 

 ing St Augustine, took a more liberal view, and the canon law as finally 

 crystallised recognised first the fortieth day for males and the eightieth 

 day for females as the moment of animation, but later the fortieth 

 day for both sexes. The ''embryo informatus" thus had no soul, the 



