Medicine+with+Versalius


 * Timeline of Key Events **


 * September A.D. 129 || Birth of Claudius Galenus ||
 * A.D. 199/217 || Death of Claudius Galenus ||
 * 1510 || Birth of Ambriose Pare ||
 * December 31, 1514 || Birth of Andreas Vesalius ||
 * 1543 || Andreas Vesalius wrote the textbook of human anatomy, //De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (On the fabric of the human body in seven books)// ||
 * October 15, 1564 || Death of Andreas Vesalius ||
 * 1578 || Birth of William Harvey ||
 * 20 December 1590 || <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Death of Ambriose Pare ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">1602 || <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">William Harvey received a doctorate of medicine ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">1628 || <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">William Harvey’s book, //On the Motion of the Heart and Blood//, was published ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">1657: || <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Death of William Harvey ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">People Involved **
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">Claudius Galenus **<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">(September AD129-199/217) was a Greek physician, writer, philosopher and leading scientist of his time. Also known as Galen, his work influenced Western medical science over a millenium until Andreas Vesalius rectified his errors.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">Andreas Vesalius **<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;"> (December 31, 1514 - October 15, 1564) was an [|anatomist], [|physician], and author of one of the most influential books on [|human anatomy], //On the Fabric of the Human Body//. He is also often referred to as the founder of modern human anatomy. He faced much controversy for having dissected a human body and was almost condemned to death.<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">[[image:Vesalius_Portrait_pg_xii_-_c.png width="119" height="149" align="right" caption="Andreas Vesalius from Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica, 1543."]]
 * Ambriose Pare (**1510 – 20 December 1590) was a French [|surgeon] and is considered as one of the fathers of surgery. He was a leader in surgical techniques and [|battlefield medicine], especially the treatment of wounds. He was also an anatomist and the inventor of several surgical instruments.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">William Harvey **<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">(1578-1657) attended Cambridge University and later Padua, where he received a doctorate of medicine in 1602. His reputation rests on his book //On the Motion of the Heart and Blood//, published in 1628.


 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">Details of Achievements and Discoveries **

As the son of a wealthy architect and farmer living in one of the richest cities in the Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire, Galen had every advantage in life and received the finest education, which was steered towards medicine. He studied medicine at various centres of learning, including Corinth and Alexandria, was chief physician to the gladiators at Pergamum for five years from AD 157, then moved to Rome, where he eventually became both the personal physician and friend of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. He also served Commodus, who was the son of Marcus Aurelius and became emperor when his father died in AD 180.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">Claudius Galenus **<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">

Galen was an obnoxious self-publicist and plagiarist--one of the kindest things he says about his fellow physicians in Rome is to refer to them as 'snotty-nosed individuals'. However, his unpleasant personality should not be allowed to obsure his achievements. Galen was a prolific writer and, like Ptolemy, summed up teachings of earlier men who he admired, notably Hippocrates. The idea of Hippocrates as the father of medicine is almost entirely a result of Galen’s writings. Hippocrates is the one usually credited with applying the idea of humoralism to medicine. Humoralism, or the doctrine of the four temperaments, as a medical theory retained its popularity for centuries largely through the influence of the writings of Galen. Essentially, this theory held that the human body was filled with four basic substances, called **four humors**, which are in balance when a person is healthy. All diseases and disabilities resulted from an excess or deficit of one of these four humors. The four humors were identified as black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Greeks and Romans, and the later Muslim and Western European medical establishments that adopted and adapted classical medical philosophy, believed that each of these humors would wax and wane in the body, depending on diet and activity. When a patient was suffering from a surplus or imbalance of one fluid, then his or her personality and physical health would be affected. This theory was closely related to the theory of the four elements: earth, fire, water and air; earth predominantly present in the black bile, fire in the yellow bile, water in the phlegm, and all four elements present in the blood.

His greatest claim to fame lay in dissection and the books he wrote about the structure of the human body. Human dissection was frowned upon at that time and thus most of Galen's work was carried out on dogs, pigs and monkeys, though there is evidence that he did dissect a few human subjects. The most studied animal was the pig ("the animal most similar to man" said Galen) and the monkey. Galen's instinct led him to realise the fundamental importance of the organs and their effective role. For example, he understood that the urinary bladder did not produce urine but that this came from the ureter (he demostrated this by joining the ureters together) and for the first time described the recurrent nerve and its role in fonation. He was very important as a practicing physician: basing his treatment on medicinal plants, he introduced several pharmaceutical drugs. For example, use of willow bark, laudanum (an opium tincture) as anaesthetics.

The revival of Galen was part of the humanist obsession with all things Greek. In religion, not only the Protestant movement of the sixteenth century but also some Catholics believe that the teaching of God had been corrupted by centuries of interpretation and amendment to Biblical writing since the time of Jesus, and there was a fundamentalist move to return to the Bible itself as the ultimate authority. Part of this involved studying the earliest Greek of the Bible rather than translations into Latin. Although the suggestion that nothing worthwhile had happened since ancient times was a little extreme, there was certainly some truth in the idea that a medical text that had been corrupted by passing through several translations (some of those translations had been made from Arabic texts translated from the Greek) and copied by many scribes might be less accurate than one might wish, and it was a landmark event in medicine when Galen's works were published in the original Greek in 1525. Ironically, since hardly any medical men could read Greek, what they actually studied were new Latin translations of the 1525 editiion. Despite this, thanks to these translations and the printing press, Galen's work was disseminated more widely than ever before over the next ten years or so. Just at this time, the young Andreas Vesalius was completing his medical education and beginning to make a name for himself.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;"> <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Possessing a strong desire to learn anatomy via direct observation, Vesalius’s attitude towards Galen and the authorities of antiquity was not quite as reverential as that of his contemporaries, and he used his own anatomical observations to revise and challenge Galen’s work. Many who felt that drawings had little place in a scientific field frowned upon this practice. He continued however and in 1538 published a collection of labelled drawings entitled ‘Tabulae Sex’. These drawings demonstrated that he understood some of the faults in Galen’s work, yet he made no open criticism of Galen’s theories.
 * Andreas Vesalius**

The whole approach of Vesalius to his subject was, if not exactly revolutionary, a profound step forward from what had gone before. He deviated from traditional practice by taking a ‘hands-on’ approach and personally dissecting a body to illustrate what he was discussing, eventually presenting a careful examination of the individual organs and general structure of the human body. In the Middle Ages, actual dissections, when undertaken at all, would be carried out for demonstration purposes by surgeons, who were regarded as inferior medical practitioners, while the learned professor would lecture on the subject from a safe distance, literally without getting his hands dirty. Vesalius performed his dissection demonstrations himself, while also explaining to his students the significance of what was being uncovered, and thereby raised the status of surgery first at Padua and gradually elsewhere as the practice spread. He also employed superb artists to prepare large diagrams used in his teaching. Six of these drawings were publised in 1538 as the //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Tabulae Anatomica Sex (Six Anatomical Pictures) // after one of the demonstration diagrams had been stolen and plagiarized. Three of the six drawings were by Vesalius homself, the other three were by John Stephen of Kalkar. He was a highly respected pupil of Titian, a highly influential painter, giving us some idea of the quality of his works He wrote the book, //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">On the Fabric of the Human Body/Seven Books on the Construction of the Human Body/Fabrica //, which was probably one of the most influential books on human anatomy. It contained anatomical drawings of all parts of the body and offered many new conclusions as to the way of treating disease. The book showed how muscle is built up in layers, highlighted errors in previous theories of anatomy and made, for the first time, good use of drawings to support the argument being presented. Vesalius was anxious to ensure the accuracy of his book and personally oversaw the production of the plates that were used for his illustrations.

The book was a major breakthrough in medical history for a number of reasons. It developed the use of technical drawings and disproved theories that had been in place in Europe for many hundred of years. The //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Fabrica // was a book for the established experts in medicine, but Vesalius also wanted to reach a wider audience. He produced alongside it a summary for students, the //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Epitome //, which was also published in 1543. Despite the clarity of his work, argument and presentation however, many people chose to dispute his theories at the time, convinced that the works of Galen were correct.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">He was a French physician, one of the most notable surgeons of the European Renaissance, regarded by some medical historians as the father of modern surgery. He was the great official royal surgeon for the kings Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III and is considered as one of the fathers of surgery. He was a leader in surgical techniques and battlefield medicine, especially the treatment of wounds. He was also an anatomist and the inventor of several surgical instruments. - Developed an ointment that could be applied to wounds to prevent invention, thus enabling people to move away from the ancient painful remedy of pouring boiling oil into wounds àAmbroise Paré used a solution of egg yolk, oil of roses, and turpentine for war wounds instead of boiling oil and cauterization. He ran out of boiling oil while treating some patients, and used an old method that the Muslims had discovered a 100 years before him. He treated the rest of the patients with the ointment of egg yolk, oil of roses and turpentine and left them overnight. When Paré returned the following morning he discovered that the soldiers treated with the boiling oil were in agony, whereas the ones treated with the ointment had recovered because of the antiseptic properties of turpentine. This proved his methods effective. However, they were not widely used until many years later. à <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Popularised this revolutionary treatment in his first book //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Method of Treating Wounds // in 1545 <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">- Developed a technique for closing wounds with stitches à He introduced the ligature of arteries instead of cauterization during amputation. To do this he designed the "//<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Bec de Corbin //" ("crow's beak"), a predecessor to modern hemostats. Although ligatures often spread infection, it still was an important breakthrough in surgical practice. Paré's classic //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Treatise on Surgery //, written in 1564, disseminated knowledge of life-saving techniques such as the ligature of blood vessels to prevent hemorrhage during amputations. à<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Pare also included large parts of Vesalius’s authoritative work on anatomy, translated from the original Latin into the vernacular French <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">
 * Ambroise Pare**

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">An English physician who was the first to describe correctly and in exact detail the systemic circulation and properties of blood being pumped around the body by the heart. - Developed an accurate theory of how the heart and the circulatory system operated à Demonstrated that the heart and not the liver was the beginning point of the circulation of blood in the body, that the same blood flows in both veins and arties, and most important, that the blood makes a complete circuit as it passes through the body à <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Proved that the heart was a pump which forced the blood through the body through arteries and also that the blood was returned to the heart through the veins - Published his book //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">On the Motion of the Heart and Blood //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> in 1628, in which he explained his methods and gave an accurate account of how he circulatory system functioned - For most part of his book, he tried to used practical evidence, but as he only had a mere lens, sometimes he had to resort to theory. One such practical was when he was trying to find out the direction of blood flow for the vein in the arm, where a physician tied a tight ligature to the upper arm of a person which cut off blood flow from the arteries and veins. His results led him to believe that veins allowed blood to flow to the heart, and valves maintained the one way flow. One theory was the existence of capillaries, which he was unable to conclude about due to scarcity of instruments.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">William Harvey **

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">**Louis Pasteur** Louis Pasteur was Professor of Chemistry at Lille in France, when a local brewer asked for his help. The fermentation process to make alcohol was going wrong. Pasteur found harmful micro-organisms in large numbers in the vats, and set to work to find out how they got there. In a series of careful experiments, he proved that the microbes that cause things to go bad float about in the air. In 1861, Pasteur published his results. After that any scientist could repeat Pasteur's experiment to check it, so nobody could argue for long that germs were not the cause of decay. Pasteur went on to show that some diseases of plants and animals were caused by germs, but he was not a doctor and did not himself prove that they cause diseases in humans. In 1865, when an epidemic of cholera hit France, Pasteur tried hard to identify the germ that carried the disease, but he failed. It was Robert Koch who took this final step to establish the germ theory of disease.

Robert Koch was a German doctor and also a very careful and determined scientific researcher, He had read of Pasteur's discoveries and he began in 1872 to look for the microbes in diseased animals and people. He found a way to stain them so that he could see them clearly and photograph them through his microscope. In this way he could identify them without any argument. He then carried out careful tests to prove beyond doubt that the microbe that he suspected did in fact cause the disease he was studying. In 1878, Koch himself discovered the microbes that cause wounds to go septic and later those that cause several diseases. In 1880 he was given an official post in a German government laboratory, and by 1900 he and his students had identified the germs causing 21 diseases. The search for microbes had become the new science of bacteriology.
 * Robert Koch**

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> His conclusions about the human body were mostly based on studies of animals and were incorrect in many ways. Since nobody seems to have done any serious research in anatomy for the next 12 or 13 centuries, his work was regarded as the last word in human anatomy until well into the sixteenth century.
 * Significance of Major Achievements and Discoveries**
 * Claudius Galenus**

The book, //On the Fabric of the Human Body//, enabled his new ideas to be spread quickly, as well as marked the starting point in scientific research and observation as we understand it today. The //Fabrica// also allowed for further medical breakthroughs--Ambroise Pare studied Vesalius’ book which then led him to make his own contributions to medicine such as developing the technique of closing wounds with stitches. Although Vesalius still clung to a number of Galen’s erroneous assertions, such as the idea on the ebb and flow of 2 kinds of blood, his discoveries laid the foundation for modern physiology and thus paved the way for further medical breakthroughs. Apart from the accuracy of its description of the human body, the importance of the Fabrica was that it emphasized the need for the professor to carry out hands-on work himself, instead of delegating the nitty-gretty of the subject to an underling. In the same vein, it stressed the importance of accepting the evidence of your own eyes, rather than believing implicitly the words handed down from past generations--the Ancients were not infallible. It took a long time for the study of human anatomy to become fully respectable--there remained a lingering disquiet about the whole business of cutting people up. However, the process of establishing that the proper study of man is man, in the wider sense, began with the work of Vesalius and the publication of the Fabrica.
 * Andreas Vesalius**

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">-Spread knowledge of his discoveries through his vernacular writings - Dissemination of surgical knowledge among the barber-surgeons of his time à <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Dramatically opened the doors of anatomical knowledge to the barber-surgeons of Pare’s time who, like Pare, were unable to read Latin and were scorned and left untrained by established physicians à <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">This, coupled with his efforts to elevate the status of surgery to a level of some prestige and professionalism led to him t o be regarded as the ‘Father of Modern Surgery’
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Ambroise Pare **

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">- His work was based on meticulous observations and experiements à <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Led him to demolish the ancient Greek’s erroneous contentions - His work dealt a severe blow to Galen’s theories à <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Received great deal of criticism from his contemporaries who distrusted any ideas which contradicted the established theories of Galen à <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Despite many still not believing his findings, his fame spread throughout Europe and his ideas began to achieve general recognition in the 1660s - - Dared to break away from established theories - - Theory of the circulation of the blood laid the foundation for modern physiology
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">William Harvey **

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">The work of these physicians established the foundations for further medical breakthroughs, thus leading to the shift from the medieval medical world to the modern world that we know today.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Conclusion **

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">Scott, J., & Culpin, C. (1996). //Medicine through time//. London: Collins Educational. Gribbin, J. (2002). //The Scientists//. United Kingdom: Allen Lane. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Mcnally, R. (n.d.). //Andreas vesalius (1514-1564)//. Retrieved from [] Andreas Vesalius. (2010, February 14). In //Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia//. Retrieved 02:27, February 20, 2010, from [] Ambroise Paré. (2010, February 7). In //Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia//. Retrieved 02:28, February 20, 2010, from [] Medawar, P. M. (n.d.). //Ambroise paré biography (1510-1590)//. Retrieved from [] //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> William harvey //<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.zephyrus.co.uk/williamharvey.html Andreas Vesalius. Retrieved 19:45, February 21, 2010 from [] History of Medicine (Galen). Retrieved 20:30, February 21, 2010 from [] Humorism - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:05, February 21, 2010, from []
 * Resources **

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