ANATOMY AND ART. 
417 
that Galen probably never dissected a human body. His 
descriptions have been followed with painful minuteness by 
Daremberg, and the conclusion is irresistible that most, if 
not all, of his dissections were made upon monkeys. Galen’s 
name was most authoritative in all matters of anatomy and 
physiology for many centuries, and the blind reverence of 
his disciples was exemplified in the reply of Silvius when 
being forced to admit the inaccuracy of one of Galen’s de¬ 
scriptions, he said that “Man had changed and not for the 
better.” 
Art was far in advance of medicine. The noble works of 
Pheidias and his contemporaries or successors were in ex¬ 
istence long before the time when Hippocrates began the 
work of rescuing medicine from the priests and made a first 
imperfect sketch of anatomy. For many ages after him 
anatomy was, in the words of a clever writer, “ traditional 
and, in great part, fictitious; physiology little more than a 
farrago of crude conceits and baseless dogma; medicine a 
dismal combination of empiricism, superstition, and filthy 
charlatanism, tinged with a slight infusion of the black 
art.” * 
It is probable that the oldest anatomical drawings known 
to exist are to be found in a Persian manuscript. It is a 
treatise on anatomy by Mansour-ben-Ahmed; it is dedi¬ 
cated to Mirza pir Mohammed, a grandson of the famous 
Tamerlane, and who died in the year 800 of the Hegira, or 
1406 of our era. There are six figures, of which one is a 
skeleton, having five false ribs on the right side and only 
four on the left—in verification, no doubt, of the story of 
the birth of Eve, for earty Persian literature has frequent 
allusions to Moses and the writings ascribed to him. An¬ 
other figure has the chest well opened, displaying the heart 
and lungs. This was a favorite subject for drawing with the 
early anatomists. The compactness, contrast of color, and 
importance of these organs made them especially fit to copy. 
*Art in its relation to medical science. William Anderson. St. Thomas 
TIosp. Rep., n. s., XV, 1886, 151-181. 
