Human dissection at Alexandria

Herophilus was born in Chalcedon, in Asia Minor, in 335 BCE and practiced medicine in Alexandria during the reigns of the first two Ptolemies, when the city was a center of Greek learning. He and his younger contemporary Erasistratus are the first physicians known to have dissected human bodies systematically.

What they did is known from later writers. In the early 1st century CE the Roman author Celsus set out the argument of their defenders: the two men had laid open living criminals handed over from prison by the kings, and while the men still breathed they had noted the position, color, shape and size of organs that nature kept hidden, and how hard or soft each one was. It was not cruel, the defenders said, to use a few condemned men to find remedies for innocent people of all later ages. Their opponents called it cruel and said it taught little, since organs change once the body is opened, and said the wounds of gladiators, soldiers and travelers attacked by robbers showed enough.

Herophilus was one of the first to tell nerves apart from blood vessels and tendons. He named the meninges and the ventricles of the brain, held that the brain was the seat of the intellect, gave the first part of the small intestine its name, duodenum, and gave the first accurate description of the liver. He described the cornea, retina, choroid, iris and vitreous humor of the eye, and he corrected his teacher Praxagoras, who had not linked the pulse to the heartbeat. Celsus records that Erasistratus explained inflammation, and the fever that came with it, as blood forced into vessels meant to carry pneuma.

Galen later absorbed the Alexandrian anatomy into his own writings. When Mondino de Luzzi dissected an executed criminal in public at Bologna in 1315, he was described as the first to perform a public human dissection since Herophilus and Erasistratus.