Galen on anatomical procedures : de Anatomicis administrationibus / translation of the surviving books with introduction and notes by Charles Singer.

  • Galen
Date:
1956
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Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Galen on anatomical procedures : de Anatomicis administrationibus / translation of the surviving books with introduction and notes by Charles Singer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    dissection, would they trouble to cut or ligate parts of the living animal, to discern the function thus impeded ? 255 At first I too had an assistant to skin the apes, avoiding the task myself as beneath my dignity. Yet when one day I found by the armpit, resting on and united to the muscles, a small piece of flesh which I could not attach to any of them, I de/ cided to skin the next ape carefully myself I had it drowned, as I usually do, to avoid crushing the neck, and tried to remove the skin from the surface, avoiding the organs beneath. I then found, extended under the whole skin of the flank, a thin membranous muscle [panniculus carnosus]. This was continuous with the covering of the spinal muscles at the loins as a fascia (syndesmon) from the bone of the spine. (I give this name SYNDESMON to all that extends from the bones, just as I call the offshoots of the brain and spinal cord nerves (neura), and the extensions (aponeuroseis) of the muscles tendons (tenontes).) Having found this muscle—the nature of 234 which will be fully and duly explained—I was the more anxious to skin the animals myself, and thus I discovered that Nature had wrought these aforesaid muscles for important functions [Fig. 8]. First I shall consider those muscles under the lower, smooth, hairless part of the hand, since it seems to me better to begin with the hand as a whole, following the order of my De usu partium.^^ For my earlier De anatomicis administrationihus lihriduo^ had followed the same order as that of Marinus^^ (and this I have mentioned in my De usu partium),^^ Now I return to the task after a long interval throughout which I have studied dissection. Thus I have now much new and more detailed knowledge, particularly in the subjects treated at the beginning of that work. For then I knew nothing of the fine muscles at the 23s extremities of the limbs which flex the first joint of each finger and toe [lumhricales]. I thought that this action was performed solely by the membrane which encloses on the outside the