Anatomy first found wide acceptance as a science in ancient Greece.

(a) Hippocrates is regarded as the father of medicine because of the sound principles of medical practice he established.

(b) The Greek philosophy of body humors dominated medical thought for over 2,000 years.

(c) Aristotle pursued a limited type of scientific method in obtaining data; his writings contain some basic anatomy.

+ Alexandria was a center of scientific learning from 300 to 30 B.C.

(a) Human dissections and vivisections were performed in Alexandria.

(b) Erasistratus is referred to as the father of physiology because of his interpretations of various body functions.

+Theoretical data was deemphasized during the Roman era.

(a) Celsus’s eight-volume work was a compilation of medical data from the  Alexandrian school.

(b) Galen was an influential medical writer who made some important advances in anatomy; at the same time he introduced serious errors into the literature that went unchallenged for centuries.

(c) Science was suppressed for nearly  1,000 years during the Middle Ages, and dissections of human cadavers were prohibited.

(d) Anatomical writings were taken from Alexandria by Arab armies, and thus saved from destruction during the Dark Ages in Europe.

+ During the Renaissance, many great European universities were established.

(a) Andreas Vesalius and Leonardo da Vinci were renowned Renaissance men who produced monumental studies of the human form.

(b) De Humani Corporis Fabrica, written by Vesalius, had a tremendous impact on the advancement of human anatomy. Vesalius is regarded as the father of human anatomy.

+ Two major scientific contributions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the explanation of blood flow and the development of the microscope.

(a) In 1628, William Harvey correctly described the circulation of blood.

(b) Shortly after the microscope had been perfected by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, many investigators added new discoveries to the rapidly changing specialty of microscopic anatomy.

+The cell theory was formulated during the nineteenth century by Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann, and cellular biology became established as a science separate from anatomy.

+ A trend toward simplification and standardization of anatomical nomenclature began in the twentieth century. In addition, many specialties within anatomy developed, including cytology, histology, embryology, electron microscopy, and radiology.

The cell theory, first developed in 1839 by Schleiden and Schwann, states that all organisms are composed of one or more cells. All cells come from preexisting cells. Vital functions of an organism occur within cells, and all cells contain the hereditary information necessary for regulating cell functions and for transmitting information to the next generation of cells.

The word cell comes from the Latin cellula, a small room. The name was chosen by Robert Hooke when he compared the cork cells he saw to the small rooms monks lived in.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(biology) ]



How Many Licks Does It Really Take?

Engineering students at Purdue University and the University of Michigan used licking machines to get to the bottom of the eternal question: "How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?" Purdue's machine averaged 364 licks while Michigan averaged 411. However, these robot tongues may have been inefficient. Hungry humans took 252 licks at most in other Tootsie tests [source: Wired].

The history of anatomy as a science extends from the earliest examinations of sacrificial victims to the sophisticated analyses of the body performed by modern scientists. It has been marked, over time, by a continually developing understanding of the functions of organs and structures in the body. Methods have also advanced drastically, advancing from examination of animals through dissection of cadavers to technologically complex techniques developed in the last century.

Ancient anatomy
begins at least as early as 1600 BC, the date of publication of an Egyptian anatomical papyrus that has survied to this day; this treatise identifies a number of organs and shows a basic knowledge of blood vessels.

The earliest medical scientist of whose works any great part survives today is Hippocrates, a Greek physician active in the late 5th and early 4th centuries BC (460-377 BC). His work demonstrates a basic understanding of musculoskeletal structure, and the beginnings of understanding of certain organs, such as the kidneys. Much of his work, however, and much of that of his students and followers later, relies on speculation rather than empirical observation of the body.

In the 4th century BC, Aristotle and several contemporaries produced a more empirically founded system, based on dissection of animals; works produced around this time are the first to identify the difference between arteries and veins, and the relations between organs are described more accurately than in previous works.

The first use of human cadavers for anatomical research occurred later in the 4th century BC, when Herophilos and Erasistratus performed dissections of cadavers in Alexandria under the auspices of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Herophilos in particular developed a body of anatomical knowledge much more informed by the actual structure of the human body than previous works had been.

Galen
The final major anatomist of ancient times was Galen, active in the 2nd century AD. He compiled much of the knowledge obtained by previous writers, and furthered the inquiry into the function of organs by performing vivisection on animals. His collection of drawings, based mostly on dog anatomy, would hold as a "Gray's Anatomy of the ancient world" for 1500 years. The original text is long gone, and his work was only known to the Rennaissance doctors through the careful custody of Arabic medicine, since the Church destroyed it as heresy. Hampered by the same religious restrictions as anatomists for centuries after him, Galen assumed that anatomical structures in dogs were the same as for humans.

Modern anatomy
Anatomical research in the past hundred years has taken advantage of technological developments and growing understanding of sciences such as evolutionary and molecular biology to create a thorough understanding of the body's organs and structures. While disciplines such as endocrinology have explained the purpose of glands that previous anatomists could not explain, medical devices such as MRI machines and CAT scanners have enabled researchers to study the organs of living people. Progress today in anatomy is centered in the field of molecular biology, as the macroscopic aspects of the field have now been catalogued and addressed.

History of anatomy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia