Science and Medicine

“In our age nothing has been so degraded and then wholly restored as anatomy,” said Andreas Vesalius in his book of 1543. If any single figure typified the transition from the Roman learning of Galen to modern knowledge, it would be Vesalius. After it became possible to practice human dissection, Vesalius placed knowledge of human anatomy on a scientific basis. Yet it was a century later before William Harvey described the circulation of the blood, and the modern era fully began. Treatments for diseases remained based on alchemy, following the work of Paracelsus (who died just before Vesalius published his book). Medical practice remained almost entirely pragmatic until it began to acquire a scientific basis in the 19th century. There was no single transition, perhaps not even a single century, that can be pointed to as the time of revolution. However, there has certainly been a transition from the medieval era, when a physician was more likely to kill you than to cure you, to the present era, when diagnosis and treatment are based on increasingly scientific tests and methodology.