A practical treatise on the diseases of the ear : including the anatomy of the organ / by D.B. St. John Roosa.

  • Roosa, D. B. St. John (Daniel Bennett St. John), 1838-1908.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practical treatise on the diseases of the ear : including the anatomy of the organ / by D.B. St. John Roosa. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    PEOGEESS IN THE ANATOMY OF THE EAE. Hippocrates probably knew very little of the anatomy of the ear, although it is supposed on doubtful grounds 570 B.C.] that Alcmceon, a disciple of Pythagoras, was aware of the passage that led from the cavity of the tym- panum to the throat, inasmuch as Aristotle quotes him as saying that goats breathed through their ears. 384-322 B.C.] The knowledge of Aristotle as to the ana- tomy of the ear did not go beyond the mem- brana tympani. A.D. 98-117] Rvfus ofEphesus, who was the first medical lex- icographer, and who lived in the age of Pliny,* used the names helix, lobe, tragus, and anti-tragus, which are still employed to describe the different parts of the auricle. Marinus, the preceptor of Galen, and whom Galen named the restorer of anatomy, called the acoustic and facial nerve one, under the name of the fifth pah1. A.D. 130] Galen does not seem to have made any great advance in anatomical studies, and they were greatly neglected down to the fifteenth century. The darkness of the blind leading the blind is scarcely broken for thirteen hundred years. What Galen wrote was authority, and naught else. One valiant skeptic in medicine would have effected more good during these centuries, than all the ponderous tomes that were written by philosophers who reasoned upon premises that had never been thoroughly established. So late as 1559 one Doctor Geynes was called before the College of Physicians in London, for impugning the fallibility of Galen. On his ac- knowledgment of his error, however, he was again received into the college.t The strong arm of the church, in.the dark ages, prevented anatomical investigations on the human cadaver, and for hun- dreds of years anatomical knowledge remained at a stand-still. Galen, however, corrected the error of his preceptor in thinking that the facial and acoustic nerves were one, and showed that the latter entered the meatus auditorius interims, i * History of Medicine. Dunglison, p. 166. f Chambers' Encyclopedia. American edition. Article, Galenus or Galen.