An outline of the history of art in its relation to medical science : being the substance of an introductory address delivered at the Medical and Physical Society of St. Thomas's Hospital, October, 1885 / by William Anderson.

  • William Edwin Anderson
Date:
[1887?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An outline of the history of art in its relation to medical science : being the substance of an introductory address delivered at the Medical and Physical Society of St. Thomas's Hospital, October, 1885 / by William Anderson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    comment upon these commentaries, would have ventured to remedy, even if they had perceived the defect. The Greeks, like the Egyptians, had a profound veneration both for medicine and for art. Sculpture, in the hands of artists, attained a perfection that has been at once the inspira- tion and the despair of later Europe; but medicine, in the hands of the priesthood, had in the same period arrived at little more than the worship of ^sculapius till a new era began with the advent of Hippocrates. It is unnecessary to dwell upon the influence of the Dogmatic School, extending as it did to the Alexandrian Academy of Herophilus, Erasistratus, and Sera- pion in the fourth century before the Christian era; to Rome two hundred years later ; to Constantinople between the fourth and seventh centuries a.d. ; to the Arabian School from the seventh to the twelfth centuries; and to every part of Europe within still more recent years; but whether it worked for good or for evil it appears to have worked without support from picture or model. There is, indeed, a single example of illustrative art that has descended to us, an image showing the abdominal and thoracic organs, disinterred in Rome about 140 years ago from the ruins of the villa of Antonius Musa, one of the physicians of the Emperor Augustus; but this, despite the fact that dissection of the human body is said to have been practised in the Alexandrian School as early as 323 B.C., merely represented the Galenical view of the anatomy of man and negatived the existence of any really scientific form of instruction. Passing to the Chinese, who were always distinguished by the courage with which they carried out their fictions in detail, we have evidence that both diagrams and models were employed from a very remote period, perhaps over two thousand years ago, in teaching an almost purely imaginative anatomy. It is to a physician named Pien Ts'iao, who is said to have flourished about the sixth century before Christ, and to have dissected the human body, that the discovery of non-existent channels of circulation for the blood and vital spirits, and the invention of the wildly elaborate theory of the pulses are attributed; and it is believed that the anatomical diagrams that may yet be seen in Chinese and Japanese books, and some of which demonstrate in the midst of absurd errors a certain acquain-
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