The development of Greek anatomy / by Ludwig Edelstein.

  • Ludwig Edelstein
Date:
1935
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The development of Greek anatomy / by Ludwig Edelstein. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/18 page 247
    vivisections, though it is at times compulsory. And the empiricists think vivisections to be cruel and useless, only because it is impos¬ sible to reach the ultimate aim of such inquires. For they, too, be¬ lieve, “ that nothing can be more ridiculous, than to imagine any¬ thing to be the same in a dying man, nay one already dead, as it is in a living person. . . . Most things are different in dead bodies.” 35 Why do the Greek physicians believe this? It is, of course, an observation of the fact that certain definite and obvious changes take place in a dead body, an observation which anyone is able to make. In spite of that, in the 5th and 4th centuries B. C., such observations, if they are made, are never seriously taken into con¬ sideration, or given anything like their real significance. Even dis¬ sections of dead and living animals have an equal value. The phi¬ losophers, who take for granted that the dead body is capable of sensation, also make no distinction between the visible aspects of dead and living bodies. But then, in the 4th century B. C., Aristotle, in accordance with Plato, advances a new theory. He says, “ Does, then, configuration and colour constitute the essence of the various animals and of their several parts? For if so, what Democritus says will be strictly correct — he says that it is evident to everyone what form it is that makes the man, seeing that he is recognizable by his shape and colour. And yet a dead body has exactly the configuration as a living one; but for all that it is not a man. So also no hand of bronze or wood or constituted in any but the appropriate way can possibly be a hand in more than name . . . precisely in the same way no part of a dead body, such I mean as its eye or its hand, is really an eye or a hand ... it is plain, then, that the teaching of the old physiologists is inadequate, and that the true method is to state what the definitive characters are that distinguish the animal as a whole . . . this some¬ thing that constitutes the form of the living being is the soul . . . when the soul departs, what is left is no longer a living animal, and none of the parts remain what they were before, excepting in mere configuration, like the animals that in the fable are turned to stone.” 36 It is the new conception of the value of the soul which 86 Celsus, loc. cit., pp. 11, 12. 80 7r. {wav /jiopluV' I 1, 640 b 30-641 a 22. In The Works of Aristotle, loc. cit.
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