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The Urinary System - 1

  • Date Submitted: 09/23/2012 11:25 AM
  • Flesch-Kincaid Score: 46 
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Every part of the world has history. Weather you are talking about animals, plants or humans. Humans have made a huge impact on the world and some people where even interested to understand how humans could. This is where anatomy comes in. Anatomy has its own history, from the early sixteenth century til now. How life involved is actually quite interesting.
At the dawn of the sixteenth century, European scholars could gain only a crude understanding of the anatomy of humans and animals. At the handful of universities where students trained in medicine—such as Bologna or Paris—professors read from the books of the Greek physician Galen. Galen had combined the philosophical work of Aristotle and other Greeks with his own lifetime of dissections, creating a system that explained not just the structure of the human body, but how the body worked.
After the fall of Rome, Galen’s legacy lived on in Arab cities like Baghdad, where his work was translated, pored over, and encrusted with interpretations and commentaries. In the 1100s, Europeans began to translate Galen from Arabic and made his work the basis of medical training. But in the many steps of translation, much of the spirit of Galen’s work—especially his emphasis on observing for oneself rather than relying on authority—was lost. A tradition had emerged in which professors read Galen to their students, while a surgeon dissected an executed criminal to show the relevant parts of the body. There was no point in the professor looking for himself at the body, since everything worth learning could be found in Galen’s books. A young Flemish anatomist changed all that when he realized that Galen was dramatically wrong. Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) started out his career as a defender of “Galenism” at the University of Paris. But when he moved to the University of Padua, he began dissecting corpses for himself to show his students the fine details of anatomy. He drew charts for the students to study, and the exquisite...



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