ABSTRACT
Few episodes in the history of ancient medicine have been so well studied as the rise and development of human anatomy in the first half of the third century BC. 1 Herophilus and Erasistratus are rightly famous for their pioneering investigations that, for the first time in the Western tradition of medicine, revealed many of the hidden structures of the human body. 2 But this concentration solely or even largely upon the achievements of these two men in anatomy and physiology is not without its dangers. There is a tendency to forget that their dissections were performed within the wider pattern of their activity as physicians, and, even more, that what might be termed investigative or experimental anatomy based on human beings was carried out only for a limited period and in a limited area. 3 Although anatomical demonstration by means of a skeleton or surface musculature continued longer in medical teaching, especially at Alexandria, anatomical experimentation, whether using humans or animals, seems to have died out well before the end of the third century BC and not to have been revived until the late first or early second century AD. 4 When discussions of anatomical and, especially, physiological phenomena appear in later Hellenistic texts, they are largely, if not entirely, based either on chance observation or on the data provided by these early anatomists. The achievements of Herophilus, Erasistratus and the less familiar Eudemus thus mark not only the beginning of Greek human anatomy but also, paradoxically, its ending, leaving historians to account for its restricted temporal and geographical development.
