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, a machine that had only just been invented.

 The Alexandrian doctors also discovered one lifesaving technique: the ligature (tying off) of blood vessels. This enabled them to perform operation s that had before been impossible: removal of goiters and bladder stones, hernia repairs, and amputations.

 Alexandria declined, but not before it had educated its most influential student, Galen. In A D 295, the Museum was destroyed during a revolt; then in 391, the Library was burned by a Christian mob; a few years later, Christians lynched the last scholar, a woman called Hypatia.