GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE 



dead. But dissection of human bodies appears 

 to have been stopped before the close of the 

 second century before Christ, though the dis- 

 section of dead and living animals continued. 



Herophilus and Erasistratus belong to the 

 Alexandrian period, though only the former 

 is known to have worked in Alexandria. They 

 were born about the year three hundred. The 

 reputation of Herophilus has come down to us 

 less assaulted than that of Erasistratus, whom 

 Galen hated for his alleged mechanical view of 

 the action of the human organs. 



Herophilus was at all events the more 

 deferential in his treatment of Hippocrates, 

 and this was to be the test of orthodoxy in the 

 Greco-Roman medical tradition. He did not 

 dispute the conception of the four humors, but 

 preferred to think of four faculties as moving 

 the human organism, to wit, the nourishing fac- 

 ulty of the liver and digestive organs, the warm- 

 ing power of the heart, the thinking faculty 

 of the brain, and the perceptive faculty of the 

 nerves. Above all, this man relied upon 

 clinical observation and the results of his dis- 

 sections. He appears to have been the first to 

 have worked through the entire human 

 anatomy. He discerned the connection be- 



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