ALEXANDRIAN OR HELLENISTIC PERIOD 



and fairly accurate study of the anatomy of the eye, 

 and greatly improved the old operation for cataract. 



With the increased knowledge of anatomy came also 

 corresponding advances in surgery, and many experi- 

 mental operations are said to have been performed 

 upon condemned criminals who were handed over to 

 the surgeons by the Ptolemies. While many modern 

 writers have attempted to discredit these assertions, 

 it is not improbable that such operations were per- 

 formed. In an age when human life was held so cheap, 

 and among a people accustomed to torturing con- 

 demned prisoners for comparatively slight offences, it 

 is not unlikely that the surgeons were allowed to inflict 

 perhaps less painful tortures in the cause of science. 

 Furthermore, we know that condemned criminals were 

 sometimes handed over to the medical profession to 

 be " operated upon and killed in whatever way they 

 thought best " even as late as the sixteenth century. 

 Tertullian l probably exaggerates, however, when he 

 puts the number of such victims in Alexandria at six 

 hundred. 



Had Herophilus and Erasistratus been as happy in 

 their deductions as to the functions of the organs as 

 they were in their knowledge of anatomy, the science 

 of medicine would have been placed upon a very high 

 plane even in their time. Unfortunately, however, 

 they not only drew erroneous inferences as to the func- 

 tions of the organs, but also disagreed radically as to 

 what functions certain organs performed, and how dis- 

 eases should be treated, even when agreeing perfectly 

 on the subject of anatomy itself. Their contribution 

 to the knowledge of the scientific treatment of diseases; 



