What Lies Within
Humans are selfish. We care about ourselves a lot more than we care about other things. The study of ourselves tends to be a lot more important than the study of other things. This study is titled anatomy, which was not able to flourish until the later epochs in human history– the Scientific Revolution and the Renaissance.
This study of anatomy was first seen in between 129 AD and 216 AD, during the life of the Greek physician Galen. Galen was one of the first to make observations about our bodies, eventually forming a hypothesis. Unfortunately, he was not able to support this hypothesis with sufficient data. The data required was the dissection of human bodies, which was prohibited by Roman law. Therefore, he had to make do with the dissection of animal bodies, which differentiated in some ways to the human body, as anatomists would later find.
The dissection of human bodies did not come until approximately 1000 years later, when Andreas Vesalius, a French university student, was allowed to do this. Much like Galen, Vesalius held many observations and decided to do what Galen was not able to do many years earlier, dissecting a human body, thereby completing Galen’s hypothesis.
Galen’s hypothesis suggested that the liver was responsible for digesting food and that blood did not circulate around the human body. The most sensible reason for this was that the data that Galen had was that of the dissection of animal bodies. Had he had access to dissections of human bodies, perhaps he would have been able to disprove the hypothesis himself.
Unfortunately, this had to have been accomplished by Andreas Vesalius when he dissected the human bodies, meaning that Galen died with false beliefs and an uncomplete hypothesis. In addition, Andreas Vesalius was not the sole anatomist who disproved Galen’s hypothesis. This was also done by William Harvey, an English physician, who was able to disprove Galen’s hypothesis by suggesting that blood circulated around the entire human body, but the center of this circulation was the heart, providing sufficient data in order to do so.
The development of anatomy is a paragon for the ideology of those epochs mentioned earlier, the Scientific Revolution and the Renaissance. The ideology was the re-evaluation and reintroduction of ideas, also indirectly the development of these ideas. In this case, Galen’s ideas were re-evaluated and reintroduced, and the development of his ideas formed what may be known as the foundation of modern anatomy.