318 | ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
lightened individuals have recognized at least some kinds of disease as 
natural processes. From that time to the present medicine has been 
primarily biological instead of theological or metaphysical. Some of 
the original ideas were, as would be expected, very far astray; for 
example, the theory that Hippocrates inaugurated and Galen ex- 
panded that proper proportions and relations of four humors of the 
body were responsible for health or disease. According to this theory 
people were sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic in tempera- 
ment depending upon which of the four humors predominated. Erro- 
neous as it was, this theory was a long step forward in that it focused 
attention on natural instead of supernatural causes, and on caring for 
the patient instead of appeasing devils. 
Hippocrates was also an exponent of the great biological principle 
that nature is the greatest physician of all. Left alone, an organism 
attempts to repair damages to its parts, to adjust itself to any unbal- 
ance in structure or function that has been entailed, and to fight off 
attacks by parasites. The role of the physician is to aid the organism 
in these attempts. In many cases this involves nothing more than 
augmentation or speeding up of natural biological processes that the 
organism itself would employ, such as stimulation of immunity, sup- 
ply of additional antibodies, provision of new tissue or fluid in the 
form of grafts or blood transfusions, supply of abundant vitamins, 
regulation of hormones, removal of unhealthy tissue, and protection 
against invasion by micro-organisms. In some cases it involves meth- 
ods which are entirely foreign to the natural processes of the animal 
body, but which aid and abet these processes, such as the use of stimu- ~ 
lants, anesthetics, specific drugs, X-rays, radium, or heat. 
The speeding up of natural processes of repair or adaptation is 
applied biology. It involves a thorough knowledge of the normal 
biology of the human body—its anatomy and all phases of its physi- 
ology. Strangely enough, even knowledge of the gross anatomy of 
the human body was extremely sketchy and mostly wrong up to the 
middle of the sixteenth century. 
Galen, of the second century A. D., was the father of anatomy for 
years, but he was a very poor father and his offspring was a very 
hodgepodge anatomy, arrived at from observations on the inner 
workings of monkeys, pigs, dogs, and cattle. For over a thousand 
years man was supposed to have a segmented breastbone like a 
monkey, a liver divided into as many lobes as a pig’s, a uterus with 
two horns like a dog’s, a hipbone flared like that of an ox, and a heart 
with pores between the right and left ventricles. If in the meantime 
any errors were discovered in Galen’s descriptions the fault was al- 
ways thought to be either with the patient or with the later observer. 
When Vesalius, in the sixteenth century, showed that man’s hipbones 
certainly were not flared as Galen described them, it was thought 
