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Ancient In 1600 BCE, the Edwin Smith Papyrus, an Ancient Egyptian medical text, described the heart, its vessels, liver, spleen, kidneys, hypothalamus, uterus and bladder, and showed the blood vessels diverging from the heart. The Ebers Papyrus (c. 1550 BCE) features a "treatise on the heart", with vessels carrying all the body's fluids to or from every member of the body.[4] The anatomy of the muscles and skeleton is described in the Hippocratic Corpus, an Ancient Greek medical work written by unknown authors.[5] Aristotle described vertebrate anatomy based on animal dissection. Praxagoras identified the difference between arteries and veins. Also in the 4th century BCE, Herophilos and Erasistratus produced more accurate anatomical descriptions based on vivisection of criminals in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic dynasty.[6][7] In the 2nd century Galen, a Roman physician, surgeon and philosopher, wrote the final and highly influential anatomy treatise of ancient times.[8] He compiled existing knowledge and studied organs through vivisection of animals.[9] Galen's drawings, based mostly on dog anatomy, became effectively the only anatomical textbook for the next thousand years.[10] His work was known to Renaissance doctors only through Islamic Golden Age medicine until it was translated from the Greek some time in the 15th century.[10] Early modern Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt – Anatomy lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer, 1617 Between 1275 and 1326, the anatomists Mondino de Luzzi, Alessandro Achillini and Antonio Benivieni at Bologna carried out the first systematic human dissections since ancient times.[11][12][13] Mondino's Anatomy of 1316 was the first textbook in the mediaeval rediscovery of human anatomy. It describes the body in the order followed in Mondino's dissections, starting with the abdomen, then the thorax, then the head and limbs. It was the standard anatomy textbook for the next century.[10] Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) (Latinized from Andries van Wezel), professor of anatomy at the University of Padua, is considered the founder of modern human anatomy.[14] Originally from Brabant, Vesalius published the influential book De humani corporis fabrica ("the structure of the human body"), a large format book in seven volumes, in 1543.[15] The accurate and intricately detailed illustrations, often in allegorical poses against Italianate landscapes, are thought to have been made by the artist Jan van Calcar, a pupil of Titian.[10][16] The artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was trained in anatomy by Andrea del Verrocchio.[10] He made use of his anatomical knowledge in his artwork, making many sketches of skeletal structures, muscles and organs of humans and other vertebrates which he dissected.[10][17] In England, anatomy was the subject of the first public lectures given in any science; these were given by the Company of Barbers and Surgeons in the 16th century, joined in 1583 by the Lumleian lectures in surgery at the Royal College of Physicians.[18] Late modern Further information: History of anatomy in the 19th century In the United States, medical schools began to be set up towards the end of the 18th century. Classes in anatomy needed a continual stream of cadavers for dissection and these were difficult to obtain. Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York were all renowned for body snatching activity as criminals raided graveyards at night, removing newly buried corpses from their coffins.[19] A similar problem existed in Britain where demand for bodies became so great that grave-raiding and even anatomy murder were practised to obtain cadavers.[20] Some graveyards were in consequence protected with watchtowers. The practice was halted in Britain by the Anatomy Act of 1832,[21][22] while in the United States, similar legislation was enacted after the physician William S. Forbes of Jefferson Medical College was found guilty in 1882 of "complicity with resurrectionists in the despoliation of graves in Lebanon Cemetery".[23] The teaching of anatomy in Britain was transformed by Sir John Struthers, Regius Professor of Anatomy at the University of Aberdeen from 1863 to 1889. He was responsible for setting up the system of three years of "pre-clinical" academic teaching in the sciences underlying medicine, including especially anatomy. This system lasted until the reform of medical training in 1993 and 2003. As well as teaching, he collected many vertebrate skeletons for his museum of comparative anatomy, published over 70 research papers, and became famous for his public dissection of the Tay Whale.[24][25] From 1822 the Royal College of Surgeons regulated the teaching of anatomy in medical schools.[26] Medical museums provided examples in comparative anatomy, and were often used in teaching.[27] Students of anatomy inadvertently led Ignaz Semmelweis to his discovery of the causes of sepsis. The students came straight from watching cadavers being dissected direct to the bedsides of women in childbirth. Semmelweis showed that by the simple procedure of the trainees washing their hands, the incidence of puerperal fever among the mothers could be cut dramatically.[28] Sagittal MRI scan of the head Before the era of modern medical procedures, the main means for studying the internal structure of the body were palpation and dissection. It was the advent of microscopy that opened up an understanding of the building blocks that constituted living tissues. Technical advances in the development of achromatic lenses increased the resolving power of the microscope and around 1839, Matthias Jakob Schleiden and Theodor Schwann identified that cells were the fundamental unit of organization of all living things. Study of small structures involved passing light through them and the microtome was invented to provide sufficiently thin slices of tissue to examine. Staining techniques using artificial dyes were established to help distinguish between different types of cell. The fields of cytology and histology developed from here in the late 19th century.[29] The invention of the electron microscope brought a great advance in resolution power and allowed research into the ultrastructure of cells and the organelles and other structures within them. About the same time, in the 1950s, the use of X-ray diffraction for studying the crystal structures of proteins, nucleic acids and other biological molecules gave rise to a new field of molecular anatomy.[29] Short wavelength electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays can be passed through the body and are used in medical radiography to view interior structures which have different degrees of opaqueness. Nowadays, modern techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, fluoroscopy and ultrasound imaging have enabled researchers and practitioners to examine organs, living or dead, in unprecedented detail. They are used for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes and provide information on the internal structures and organs of the body to a degree far beyond the imagination of earlier generations.[30] |
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