The lost glory of medicine- Alexandria
The glories of Alexandria — the Greek city founded in Egypt in 331 BC by Alexander the Great — were its Library, which may have contained some 700,000 volumes, and its Museum ( ‘house of the Muses’), a publicly-funded research in situ te. There was very little Egyptian influence in these Hellenistic enclaves, but the Ptolemaic rulers did allow the dissection of human corpses (and perhaps even live criminals), a taboo among the Greeks. Herophilus, who lived in the 3rd century BC, was the first true anatomist, discovering and naming the prostate and the duodenum (from the Greek for ‘12 fingers ’, this breadth being the length of what he found ). He also distinguished arteries from nerves, and sensory from motor nerves and carried out the first methodical investigation of the brain. His contemporary Erasistratus did not hold with the four senses of humor theory. When he dissected the heart and found it had four one-way valves, he surmised that at it was a pump...