Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/108

 GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE dead. But dissection of human bodies appears to have been stopped before the close of the second century before Christ, though the dis- section of dead and living animals continued. Herophilus and Erasistratus belong to the Alexandrian period, though only the former is known to have worked in Alexandria. They were born about the year three hundred. The reputation of Herophilus has come down to us less assaulted than that of Erasistratus, whom Galen hated for his alleged mechanical view of the action of the human organs. Herophilus was at all events the more deferential in his treatment of Hippocrates, and this was to be the test of orthodoxy in the Greco-Roman medical tradition. He did not dispute the conception of the four humors, but preferred to think of four faculties as moving the human organism, to wit, the nourishing fac- ulty of the liver and digestive organs, the warm- ing power of the heart, the thinking faculty of the brain, and the perceptive faculty of the nerves. Above all, this man relied upon clinical observation and the results of his dis- sections. He appears to have been the first to have worked through the entire human anatomy. He discerned the connection be- [86]