Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: Who first performed human dissection?
Human dissections were carried out by the Greek physicians Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Chios in the early part of the third century BC. During this period, the first exploration into full human anatomy was performed rather than a base knowledge gained from 'problem-solution' delving. While there was a deep taboo in Greek culture concerning human dissection, there was at the time a strong push by the Ptolemaic government to build Alexandria into a hub of scientific study. For a time, Roman law forbade dissection and autopsy of the human body, so physicians had to use other cadavers. Galen, for example, dissected the Barbary macaque and other primates, assuming their anatomy was basically the same as that of humans.
Although most of the relevant tissues and endocrine glands had been identified by early anatomists, a more humoral approach to understanding biological function and disease was favoured by the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers such as Aristotle, Hippocrates, Lucretius, Celsus, and Galen, according to Freeman et al., and these theories held sway until the advent of germ theory, physiology, and organ basis of pathology in the 19th century.
In 1820, Justinus Kerner, a small-town German medical officer and romantic poet, gave the first complete description of clinical botulism based on extensive clinical observations of so-called “sausage poisoning”. Following experiments on animals and on himself, he concluded that the toxin acts by interrupting signal transmission in the somatic and autonomic motor systems, without affecting sensory signals or mental functions. He observed that the toxin develops under anaerobic conditions, and can be lethal in minute doses. His prescience in suggesting that the toxin might be used therapeutically earned him recognition as the pioneer of modern botulinum toxin therapy.
Edward Tyson is regarded as the founder of modern comparative anatomy. He is credited with determining that whales and dolphins are, in fact, mammals. Also, he concluded that chimpanzees are more similar to humans than to monkeys because of their arms. Marco Aurelio Severino also compared various animals, including birds, in his "Zootomia democritaea", one of the first works of comparative anatomy. In the 18th and 19th century, great anatomists like George Cuvier, Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley revolutionized our understanding of the basic build and systematics of vertebrates, laying the foundation for Charles Darwin's work on evolution. An example of a 20th-century comparative anatomist is Victor Negus, who worked on the structure and evolution of the larynx. Until the advent of genetic techniques like DNA sequencing, comparative anatomy together with embryology were the primary tools for understanding phylogeny, as exemplified by the work of Alfred Romer.
The history of biochemistry can be said to have started with the ancient Greeks who were interested in the composition and processes of life, although biochemistry as a specific scientific discipline has its beginning around the early 19th century. Some argued that the beginning of biochemistry may have been the discovery of the first enzyme, diastase (today called amylase), in 1833 by Anselme Payen, while others considered Eduard Buchner's first demonstration of a complex biochemical process alcoholic fermentation in cell-free extracts to be the birth of biochemistry. Some might also point to the influential work of Justus von Liebig from 1842, "Animal chemistry, or, Organic chemistry in its applications to physiology and pathology", which presented a chemical theory of metabolism, or even earlier to the 18th century studies on fermentation and respiration by Antoine Lavoisier.
Edward Tyson (20 January 1651 – 1 August 1708) was a British scientist and physician, commonly regarded as the founder of modern comparative anatomy, which compares the anatomy between species.
In 1895 (seventy-five years later), Émile van Ermengem, professor of bacteriology and a student of Robert Koch, correctly described "Clostridium botulinum" as the bacterial source of the toxin. Thirty-four attendees at a funeral were poisoned by eating partially salted ham, an extract of which was found to cause botulism-like paralysis in laboratory animals. Van Ermengem isolated and grew the bacterium, and described its toxin, which was later purified by P Tessmer Snipe and Hermann Sommer.
It was in the late 1600s that plant anatomy became refined into a modern science. Italian doctor and microscopist, Marcello Malpighi, was one of the two founders of plant anatomy. In 1671 he published his "Anatomia Plantarum", the first major advance in plant physiogamy since Aristotle. The other founder was the British doctor Nehemiah Grew. He published "An Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants" in 1672 and "The Anatomy of Plants" in 1682. Grew is credited with the recognition of plant cells, although he called them 'vesicles' and 'bladders'. He correctly identified and described the sexual organs of plants (flowers) and their parts.
Marie Jean Pierre Flourens (13 April 1794 – 6 December 1867), father of Gustave Flourens, was a French physiologist, the founder of experimental brain science and a pioneer in anesthesia. Through the study of ablations on animals, he was the first to prove that the mind was located in the brain, not the heart.
The first publicized discovery of a partial fossil mosasaur skull in 1764 by quarry workers in a subterranean gallery of a limestone quarry in Mount Saint Peter, near the Dutch city of Maastricht, preceded any major dinosaur fossil discoveries, but remained little known. However, a second find of a partial skull drew the Age of Enlightenment's attention to the existence of fossilized animals that were different from any known living creatures. When the specimen was discovered between 1770 and 1774, Johann Leonard Hoffmann, a surgeon and fossil collector, corresponded about it with the most influential scientists of his day, making the fossil famous. The original owner, though, was Godding, a canon of Maastricht cathedral.
Group C
Tonsillectomies have been practiced for over 2,000 years, with varying popularity over the centuries. The procedure is claimed in some books as "Hindu medicine" about 1000 BCE (non-evidence based literature). Others refer to it as cleaning of tonsil using the nail of the index finger. Roughly a millennium later the Roman aristocrat Aulus Cornelius Celsus (25 BCE – 50 CE) described a procedure whereby using the finger (or a blunt hook if necessary), the tonsil was separated from the neighboring tissue before being cut out. Galen (121–200 CE) was the first to advocate the use of the surgical instrument known as the snare, a practice that was to become common until Aetius (490 CE) recommended partial removal of the tonsil, writing "Those who extirpate the entire tonsil remove, at the same time, structures that are perfectly healthy, and, in this way, give rise to serious Hæmorrhage". In the 7th century Paulus Aegineta (625–690) described a detailed procedure for tonsillectomy, including dealing with the inevitable post-operative bleeding. 1,200 years pass before the procedure is described again with such precision and detail.
The history of the oxygenator, or artificial lung, dates back to 1885, with the first demonstration of a disc oxygenator, on which blood was exposed to the atmosphere on rotating discs by Von Frey and Gruber. These pioneers noted the dangers of blood streaming, foaming and clotting. In the 1920s and 30s, research into developing extracorporeal oxygenation continued. Working independently, Brukhonenko in the USSR and John Heysham Gibbon in the USA demonstrated the feasibility of extracorporeal oxygenation. Brukhonenko used excised dog lungs while Gibbon used a direct contact drum type oxygenator, perfusing cats for up to 25 minutes in the 1930s.
The discovery of the MHC and role of histocompatibility in transplantation was a combined effort of many scientists in the 20th century. A genetic basis for transplantation rejection was proposed in a 1914 Nature paper by C.C. Little and Ernest Tyyzer, which showed that tumors transplanted between genetically identical mice grew normally, but tumors transplanted between non-identical mice were rejected and failed to grow. The role of the immune system in transplant reject was proposed by Peter Medawar, whose skin graft transplants in world war two victims showed that skin transplants between individuals had much higher rejection rates then self-transplants within an individual, and that suppressing the immune system delayed skin transplant rejection. Medawar shared the 1960 Nobel Prize in part for this work.
Blood types were first discovered by an Austrian Physician Karl Landsteiner working at the Pathological-Anatomical Institute of the University of Vienna (now Medical University of Vienna). In 1900, he found that blood sera from different persons would clump together (agglutinate) when mixed in test tubes, and not only that some human blood also agglutinated with animal blood. He wrote a two-sentence footnote:
Michigan State University, Kellogg Biological Station: Eminent Ecologist (1992)
Alexander Fleming had first discovered penicillin by accident in 1928, but at that time believed it had little application. When Florey and his team recognised the potential of the discovery for combating bacterial infection, they faced the problem of how to manufacture penicillin in sufficient quantities to be of use. Heatley, although the junior member of the team, possessed a natural gift for ingenuity and invention. It was he who suggested transferring the active ingredient of penicillin back into water by changing its acidity, thus purifying the penicillin.
For decades biologists had been at work on the medicine that became penicillin. In 1928, Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming discovered a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. In 1929, he named the new substance "penicillin". His publications were largely ignored at first, but it became a significant antibiotic in the 1930s. In 1930, Cecil George Paine, a pathologist at Sheffield Royal Infirmary, used penicillin to treat sycosis barbae, eruptions in beard follicles, but was unsuccessful. Moving on to ophthalmia neonatorum, a gonococcal infection in infants, he achieved the first recorded cure with penicillin, on November 25, 1930. He then cured four additional patients (one adult and three infants) of eye infections, but failed to cure a fifth.
The first transfer of an embryo from one human to another resulting in pregnancy was reported in July 1983 and subsequently led to the announcement of the first human birth 3 February 1984. This procedure was performed at the Harbor UCLA Medical Center under the direction of Dr. John Buster and the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine.
Among the first scientists to explore the Muirkirk Deposit was Maryland state geologist Phillip Thomas Tyson. He brought some of the strange bones discovered in the iron mines to a meeting of the Maryland Academy of Sciences in 1859, where his colleagues identified them as dinosaurs. Paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh was also interested in Maryland fossils. In the winter of 1887, he sent John Bell Hatcher to search the iron mines. Hatcher recovered hundreds of fossils, including the remains of ancient turtles and crocodiles. In the 1890s, Smithsonian Institution scientists Charles Gilmore and Arthur Bibbins also visited Prince George's County, uncovering dinosaur teeth and other fossils that were added to the Smithsonian collection.
In 1880, while working in the military hospital in Constantine, Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran discovered that the cause of malaria is a protozoan. He observed the parasites in a blood smear taken from a soldier who had just died of malaria. For this, he received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. This was the first time that protozoa were shown to be a cause of disease. His work helped inspire researchers and veterinarians today to try to find a cure for malaria in animals.
Galen's principal interest was in human anatomy, but Roman law had prohibited the dissection of human cadavers since about 150 BC. Because of this restriction, Galen performed anatomical dissections on living (vivisection) and dead animals, mostly focusing on pigs and primates. This work was useful because Galen believed that the anatomical structures of these animals closely mirrored those of humans. Galen clarified the anatomy of the trachea and was the first to demonstrate that the larynx generates the voice. In one experiment, Galen used bellows to inflate the lungs of a dead animal. Galen's work on the anatomy remained largely unsurpassed and unchallenged up until the 16th century in Europe. In the middle of the 16th century, the anatomist Andreas Vesalius challenged the anatomical knowledge of Galen by conducting dissections on human cadavers. These investigations allowed Vesalius to refute aspects of Galen's anatomy.
In 1835, he was transferred to the new CMC, where he was fundamental in gathering Indian support for practical anatomy and in breaking down Hindu taboos on touching the dead, consequently taking sole responsibility for the first human dissection, performed under the guidance of Professor Henry Goodeve and assisted by four other Hindu students. Controversies regarding the exact date of the first procedure, whether other students had performed it before and whether a military salute was given, remain. Despite any discrepancies, this singular act of dissection has become symbolic of the move of western medicine into India.
Mondino was the first to incorporate a systematic study of anatomy and dissection into a medical curriculum. The dissection of human cadavers was a hallmark of the Alexandrian school, but declined after 200 A.D. due to legal and religious proscriptions. These bans were eventually lifted, allowing Mondino to perform his first public dissection in Bologna in January 1315 in the presence of medical students and other spectators. The proceedings were formally sanctioned by the Vatican, and the subject was mostly likely a female executed criminal. It was common practice for the professor of anatomy to sit in a large, ornate chair elevated above the dissection proceedings, reading from an anatomical text and providing commentary, while a "demonstrator", or surgeon, physically performed the dissection. Additionally, an "ostensor" was present to point out the specific parts of the body that were being examined. Mondino's teaching methods were unique because he often performed dissections in person and served the role of demonstrator himself, carefully studying the cadaver and incorporating this personal experience into his text and teaching.
From the 3rd century BCE until the 12th century, human anatomy was mainly learned through books and animal dissection. While it was claimed by 19th century polemicists that human dissection became restricted after Boniface VIII passed a papal bull that forbade the dismemberment and boiling of corpses for funerary purposes and this is still repeated in some generalist works, this claim has been debunked as a myth by modern historians of science. For many decades human dissection was thought unnecessary when all the knowledge about a human body could be read about from early authors such as Galen. In the 12th century, as universities were being established in Italy, Emperor Frederick II made it mandatory for students of medicine to take courses on human anatomy and surgery. Students who had the opportunity to watch Vesalius in dissection at times had the opportunity to interact with the animal corpse. At the risk of letting their eagerness to participate become a distraction to their professors, medical students preferred this interactive teaching style at the time. In the universities the lectern would sit elevated before the audience and instruct someone else in the dissection of the body, but in his early years Mondino de Luzzi performed the dissection himself making him one of the first and few to use a hands on approach to teaching human anatomy.Specifically in 1315, Mondino de' Liuzzi is credited with having "performed the first human dissection recorded for Western Europe."