Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/66

 6o TEE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

an Influence which exerted itself in ever increasing force almost to within onr own day. For, as Professor MahalSy says, the man whose writings dominated European thought in logic and in the mental and physical sciences for more than a millennium, and who came within a very little of being canonized by the church of Rome, was probably the greatest of the ancients. Aristotle was as much the creator of the sci- ence of logic as he was of the sciences of zoology, embryology and com- parative anatomy. He discovered the heart of the unhatched chick (punctum saliens) and saw it pulsating. He named the great artery that proceeds from the heart, aorta, by which term it has ever since been known. He adopted the Hippocratic classification of the humors, but did not rectify the confusing of nerves with tendons. He distinguished arteries from veins ; but he described a vein from the liver to the right arm, and another from the spleen to the left arm, hence blood letting on the same side as the organ affected was especially valuable. This error gave rise to a long controversy during the Middle Ages as to where to open a vein; entire medical schools, even whole universities, being ranged on one side and on the other.

To Aristotle the heart is the acropolis of the body, and he makes the neura or tendons arise from the heart. The nerves, as canals lead- ing from the brain, he understands, but, believing the brain to be blood- less, he attributes no functions of any great importance to it. The object of respiration he imagined to be the drawing in of cold air to cool the innate heat of the heart, a view which was held until the time of Harvey. As Professor Driesch says :

What inspires us with the highest admiration of the great Greek thinker Is the way in which he perpetuallj and manifestly struggles for clearness in this hardest of aU Nature's problems (life).

Aristotle frequently writes with his eye on the medical profession. He says:

It is the business of the naturalist to know also the causes of health and dis- ease, hence most naturalists see in medicine the conclusion of their studies; and of physicians, those at least who display some scientiJftc knowledge in the prac- tise of their art, begin the study of medicine with the natural sciences,

SO that custom at least is as old as the time of Aristotle.

But this is, indeed, a late date to be telling people what Aristotle did for every department of knowledge to which he had access. His writings were the academic text-books of the Middle Ages; and the study of them is by no means dispensed with at our seats of learning to-day.

From about 300 B.C. onwards for several hundreds of years, medicine flourished in particular in two Greek colonies, Alexandria in Egypt and Pergamos in Mysia. Both were populous and rich cities, centers of all manner of intellectual and artistic activities.

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