AMONG THE GREEKS 67 



And the shaggy rough-maned steed is broken to bear 

 the bit. 



— Sophocles : Antigone, verses 342 ff . 

 Translation of F. Storr. 



Inasmuch as the Egyptians were well ad- 

 vanced in anatomy and medicine long before the 

 dawn of Greek civilization, it is not surprising 

 that as early as the seventh century b. c. we have 

 records of the practice of anatomy in Greece. 

 Certainly at a very early date was begun the 

 dissection of the human body and the attribution 

 of physical and psychical functions to various or- 

 gans of the body. Thus Empedocles of Agrigen- 

 tum (495-435 B. c.) regarded the blood as the 

 seat of the "innate heat." Agrigentum (the mod- 

 ern Girgenti) was the centre of the Sicilian 

 school of medicine which gives us the first hint of 

 human dissection and of the comparison of the 

 hearts of animals w^ith that of man. The distinc- 

 tion of writing the first work on human anatomy 

 belongs to Diodes, who lived in the fourth cen- 

 tury B. c. This is on the testimony of the first 

 great anatomist in the modern sense, Galen 

 (130-c, 200), although we know the treatises of 

 Hippocrates, whose greatest activity was about 

 400 B. c, and those of his son-in-law Polybus On 

 the Nature of Man and On the Nature of Bones. 

 The treatise on anatomy by Herophilus is exten- 

 sively quoted by Galen. 



