Sect. 1.—Knowledge of Galen and his Predecessors.
IN the earliest conceptions which men entertained of their power of moving their own members, they probably had no thought of any mechanism or organization by which this was effected. The foot and the hand, no less than the head, were seen to be endowed with life; and this pervading life seemed sufficiently to explain the power of motion in each part of the frame, without its being held necessary to seek out a special seat of the will, or instruments by which its impulses were made effective. But the slightest inspection of dissected animals showed that their limbs were formed of a curious and complex collection of cordage, and communications of various kinds, running along and connecting the bones of the skeleton. These cords and communications we now distinguish as muscles, nerves, veins, arteries, &c.; and among these, we assign to the muscles the office of moving the parts to which they are attached, as cords move the parts of a machine. Though this action of the muscles on the bones may now appear very obvious, it was, probably, not at first discerned. It is observed that Homer, who describes the wounds which are inflicted in his battles with so much apparent anatomical precision, nowhere employs the word muscle. And even Hippocrates of Cos, the most celebrated physician of antiquity, is held to have had no distinct conception of such an organ.[1] He always employs the word flesh when he means muscle, and the first explanation of the latter word (μῦς) occurs in a spurious work ascribed to him. For nerves, sinews, ligaments,[2] he used indiscriminately the same terms; (τόνος or νεῦρον;) and of these nerves (νεῦρα) he asserts that they contract the limbs. Nor do we find much more distinctness on this subject even in Aristotle, a generation or two later. “The origin of the νεῦρα,” he says,[3] “is from the heart; they connect [439] the bones, and surround the joints.” It is clear that he means here the muscles, and therefore it is with injustice that he has been accused of the gross error of deriving the nerves from the heart. And he is held to have really had the merit[4] of discovering the nerves of sensation, which he calls the “canals of the brain” (πόροι τοῦ ἐγκεφάλου); but the analysis of the mechanism of motion is left by him almost untouched. Perhaps his want of sound mechanical notions, and his constant straining after verbal generalities, and systematic classifications of the widest kind, supply the true account of his thus missing the solution of one of the simplest problems of Anatomy.
[1] Sprengel, Geschichte der Arzneikunde, i. 382.
[2] Sprengel, Gesch. Arz. i. 385.
[3] Hist. Anim. iii. 5.
[4] Ib. i. 456.
In this, however, as in other subjects, his immediate predecessors were far from remedying the deficiencies of his doctrines. Those who professed to study physiology and medicine were, for the most part, studious only to frame some general system of abstract principles, which might give an appearance of connexion and profundity to their tenets. In this manner the successors of Hippocrates became a medical school, of great note in its day, designated as the Dogmatic school;[5] in opposition to which arose an Empiric sect, who professed to deduce their modes of cure, not from theoretical dogmas, but from experience. These rival parties prevailed principally in Asia Minor and Egypt, during the time of Alexander’s successors,—a period rich in names, but poor in discoveries; and we find no clear evidence of any decided advance in anatomy, such as we are here attempting to trace.
[5] Sprengel, Gesch. Arz. i. 583.
The victories of Lucullus and Pompeius, in Greece and Asia, made the Romans acquainted with the Greek philosophy; and the consequence soon was, that shoals of philosophers, rhetoricians, poets, and physicians[6] streamed from Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, to Rome and Italy, to traffic their knowledge and their arts for Roman wealth. Among these, was one person whose name makes a great figure in the history of medicine, Asclepiades of Prusa in Bithynia. This man appears to have been a quack, with the usual endowments of his class;—boldness, singularity, a contemptuous rejection of all previously esteemed opinions, a new classification of diseases, a new list of medicines, and the assertion of some wonderful cures. He would not, on such accounts, deserve a place in the history of science, but that he became the founder of a new school, the Methodic, which professed to hold itself separate both from the Dogmatics and the Empirics.
[6] Sprengel, Gesch. Arz. ii. 5.