University of Maryland School of Medicine - Terrae Mariae Medicus (Baltimore, MD)

Page 16 text:

The Staff of Terrae Mariae Medicus Editor in Chief Susan Legat Associate Editor Louis Olsen Copy Editor William Legat Ph otog niphy Editor SuSAN Legat Photography Robert Torrence Business Manager Harry Brown Layouts SUSAN LEGAT, LOUIS OLSEN, WILLIAM SCHICK Senior Writeups Alan Judman, WILLIAM Legat, Robert Whitlock O rga n iza tions Writeups Louis Olsen Subject Writeups William Legat Dedication to Dr. Dietrich Smith Victoria Whitelock Dedication to Dr. Milton Sachs William Legat Those of us who worked on this book are grateful for the time, energy, and talent contributed by two students of The Johns Hopkins University, William Schick and Micheal Long, both of whom were invaluable in advis- ing, criticising and assembling this work. 12

Page 15 text:

DR. MILTON S. SACHS n

Page 17 text:

ANATOMY: Its history and role in the evolution of the medical curriculum by Frank H. J. Figge The civilized period of human evokition has been estimated to cover a span of 4500 years. Major medical and scientific advancements have occurred only within the last 415 years, or since the time of Andreas Vesalius and the publication of his great book De Corporis Humani Fabrica or The Structure of the Human Body. It is indeed a classic, and it is considered to be one of the ten greatest contributions to the field of medicine. Long before this, during the years 3000 to 1000 B.C., medicine was very primitive and progress extremely slow, due primarily to man ' s vague and mysterious concepts of death and the hereafter. It was probably not realized that for medicine to advance, it would be necessary for medical practi- tioners to acquire a fundamental concept of mor- phology, the study of the arrangement of parts in human subjects. It was not appreciated that such morphological concepts would be necessary pre- requisites to the understanding of both normal and disease processes. The pre-Alexandrian period, which lasted seven hundred years from 1000 to 300 B.C., was a time when dissection was not actually practiced, but it does mark the era in which anatomy, as a formal discipline, had its beginnings. The spiritual and political climate at this time was not conducive to the practice of human dissection, for it was pre- vented by prejudice and banned by law. At the time of Aristotle, who was the first real compar- ative anatomist, anatomy was a mixture of sym- bolism, conjecture and philosophy derived from observation of open wounds, injuries, and disin- tegrated bodies. Some mammalian anatomy had been learned from the religious sacrifice of ani- mals, but it was admitted by Aristotle that the Inward parts of man are known lea.st of all. In Italy, anatomical knowledge was probably more suppressed than in other areas because it was against Roman custom to perform human dissec- tion. The human body was held in great reverence and a belief in resurrection prevented any prac- tice of physical dismemberment. In the pre-Alex- andrian period, there is some evidence that the Hindus may have actually examined the human body. They were said to have enclosed dead human subjects in bags and allowed them to decompose for nine days in a river. In this way, the internal organs could be separated and examined without a knife. This method was employed because the use of a knife was forbidden by Hindu religious law. It thus appears that the dream of every fresh- man medical student was realized over 3000 years ago ; that is, a method to dissolve fascia. The real birth of anatomy as a science occurred during the period of the Alexandrian School be- tween 300 B.C.-200 A.D. The Greeks did not per- mit human dissection in their own country, but had no objection to its being performed in Alex- andria, Egypt, one of their conquered territories. This city was an important center for learning, and Alexander the Great founded a magnificent educational and medical center there. The reli- gious climate at this time and place .stimulated the initiation of dissection. The Platonic and Stoic schools of philosophy were on the wane, mono- theism and Judaism were flourishing, and the behef in Gnosticism was gaining ground. The Gnostics believed that emancipation came through knowledge and they held the human body in dis- dain. To them, it was merely a cage or prison of the immortal soul. For the many who held this belief, life was an unpleasant prelude to the wel- come of death. Because of their relative disregard for the human body and respect for learning, there developed an enlightened attitude resulting in the first complete dissections of a human subject. Herophilus and Erasistratus were two of the first anatomists to take advantage of this situation. They were active in the establishment in Alexan- dria of a school of Medicine which flourished for more than 300 years. They were thus the fathers of anatomy and must be credited with develop- ing anatomy into a distinct branch of the sciences. Herophilus was the first to open the body after death for the purpose of discovering the character and nature of the disease. He was described as a tireless investigator and a pioneer in dissecting human bodies in public. Initially he asked for and was granted permission to dissect the bodies of two executed criminals. He is reputed to have care- fully dissected from 200 to 600 human specimens. 13