History of Anatomy

by Read Listen Learn

Galen, who lived from 129 AD to between 200 and 216, is known as the father of anatomy (or the study of the human body). His classic textbook was re-discovered in western Europe in the fourteenth century and was still used in the sixteenth. It was so highly-regarded that at least two people were publicly burnt for criticising some of Galen’s findings.

Galen was born in (what is now) Turkey, a part of the Roman Empire and, for four years, was doctor to the gladiators at the time of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. (This was exactly the same period as the action of the Hollywood film called ‘Gladiator’, starring Russell Crowe.) During his four years in this job, only four gladiators died under his knife. He went on to become Emperor Commodius’ doctor and also understood the importance of diet, physical exercise and hygiene for health.

It is, therefore, surprising that Galen never dissected a human body. This was forbidden at the time. He only practised his skills on pigs and monkeys, but as everyone thought that their bodies were the same as human ones, nobody saw this as a disadvantage.

Of course, there were many mistakes in Galen’s book but professors of medicine in Europe in the Middle Ages did not mention these for years when they looked at human corpses. Students knew that if they wanted to pass their university exams and become doctors, they had to copy what Galen had written in his book and pay no attention to what they could see with their own eyes in their anatomy lessons.

Andreas Vesalius (1514 – 1564) changed all that. He found more than two hundred mistakes in Galen’s work and, perhaps because he was Emperor Charles V’s doctor, had the courage to publish them. This made him very unpopular. A British surgeon, William Harvey (who lived from 1578 till 1657), corrected Galen’s studies of the heart. However, both Vesalius and Harvey had a similar problem to Galen: although they could dissect human bodies, very few people offered their corpses to medical science. (Harvey actually dissected both his own father and sister to learn more.)

Perhaps, the artist William Hogarth’s picture of a dissection room explains why: they were dirty – Hogarth’s picture even shows a dog in the room looking hungrily at a human heart – and showed no respect to the dead person. Only hanged murderers’ bodies could be cut up and hospitals got four bodies a year. Because of this, doctors advertised public dissections in halls and paid for dead bodies. They could not be choosy because there were never enough and so they did not always ask where the bodies came from.

Of course, this situation meant bodies were stolen from their graves as soon as they were buried and some people were actually murdered so that their bodies could be sold to doctors.

In 1828, two Irish hotel keepers, William Burke and William Hare, sold the body of a guest who had died in the night to a doctor and earnt so much money from it that they then went on to murder sixteen people.

Nobody asked any questions until a dead body was found under a bed in their hotel. Burke was hanged, his body was dissected and his skin used as leather. Because Hare co-operated with the police, they set him free. But the murders were useful in one way because the government finally realised the importance of dissection to medical science and changed the law so that they could use the bodies of poor people who had no family.

Nowadays, the geography of the human body is well-understood. However, it is still useful for eighteen-year-old medical students straight from secondary school who, for the first time in their lives, come face to face with terrible injuries and diseases. The dissecting room is where they get used to blood and the surgeon’s knife.