For centuries no area of science flaunted such a small ratio of meaningful "practick" to empty theory, as biology. The early history of biology was a catastrophe because of man's inability to put "practick" before authority and "speculative" thought. Observation was downgraded to an irrelevancy. It is difficult to excuse the immense durability of Aristotle's descriptions of the form and functioning of animals and plants. There is very little in his writings on biology that has stood the test of time, and much of what he wrote could have been shown to be wrong by simple use of the naked eye. But no one dared to seriously challenge the master until the late Middle Ages. Unfortunately, he was not the only sacred bull.

On the kitchen wall of my home hangs a large, luxuriant drawing of a lavender plant. Beneath the proliferating roots are the words Mattioli, Venezia 1565. Pierandrea Mattioli (1501-1577) published a best-seller in 1544: the first translation into a modern European language of the classic De Materia Medica of Dioscorides.

Dioscorides, a first-century A.D. surgeon in the service of Nero's armies, used his spare moments to make drawings of plants and to list their real or supposed medicinal effects. The resulting herbal, written in Greek, was to influence European botany for the next 1,500 years. It became a holy text, repeatedly copied. Like the story whispered from ear to ear at a party game, the illustrations drifted farther and farther away from the originals, and for fifteen centuries people were reading and teaching from books that contained drawings of plants removed from the reality revealed to them by their own eyes. Dioscorides was the standard text in many European universities until the middle 1500s. Only then did three Lutheran Germans produce a trio of herbals that were illustrated by accurate, and often very beautiful, drawings. The accompanying texts, however, still borrowed heavily from Dioscorides. The most successful of these herbals was Leonhard Fuchs's Historia Stirpium (1542), which came out in a German translation the following year. The fuschia was named after Fuchs.

The fossilization of botany was paralleled by the stagnation of zoology. For centuries Aristotle was the accepted textual authority, but it was the bestiary of Physiologus, a second-century Greek, that was the prototype of the immensely popular medieval bestiaries. Physiologus's descriptions of animal behavior were rather low on fact. Everything was buried in a morass of mythology, theology, and popular beliefs. The animal kingdom was apparently created to provide Aesop with material for his tales. Every beast illustrated a moral lesson.

A totally unreliable bestiary does not threaten the health of the average armadillo, but a surgeon could be lethal if he worked from a Renaissance text on human anatomy.

If you are in Uppsala, visit the seventeenth-century anatomy lecture theater in the Gustavatium. The benches are arranged in elliptical tiers, to form a steep funnel at the bottom of which stood the table upon which the dissection was performed. Climb the narrow steps up to one of the upper benches and imagine yourself in the world of a seventeenth-century student: the crowded, exclusively male gathering looking down at the waxen, gashed corpse as its inner architecture was revealed by the dissector, to the accompaniment of a commentary read by the professor. Usually it was a male corpse, since most of the corpses were those of criminals. Often the dissection took longer than a week and so winter was the preferred season because it was colder and the nauseating stench that rose through the theater was reduced.

When I sat in that theater and looked down to the table, I knew that blindness, literal and metaphorical, had prevailed. First, it was impossible at that distance for the student to see anything but the coarsest detail. Second, in the seventeenth century, the commentary of the learned professor of anatomy was taken from an unreliable text written fifteen centuries before the dissection.

Galen (c. 130-200), a Greek born in Pergamos, learned much of his anatomy as a physician to gladiators. He settled in Rome and became the court physician to the philosophical emperor, Marcus Aurelius. He turned out torrents of treatises on everything from physiology to philosophy.

Galen was worthy of his reputation as the greatest physician after Hippocrates (c. 460-377 B.C.). In accord with twentieth-century trends, he favored prevention over cure. He was a brilliant experimenter, among other things demonstrating the pulse that spread along the arteries from the heart. Dissection of the human body was forbidden in Rome. Galen had to content himself with the dissection of pigs and Barbary apes, and the examination of a couple of human skeletons that he came upon by chance. [1] The extraordinary fact is that the anatomy of two animals was regarded as part of the definitive source of information on human anatomy for about 1,500 years. In the dissecting theaters of sixteenth-century Padua and seventeenth-century Uppsala, the dissector did his work while the professor stood to one side and read from second-century Galen. Galen, like Dioscorides, had emphasized the importance of observation and the danger of being overly influenced by existing texts. To no avail. He survived through the Dark Ages, and, like many other Greek authors, his reputation blossomed at the time of the Renaissance. He was first published in a printed Latin translation by the famous Aldine Press in Venice, in 1476. The text spread over Europe, and in most universities it was considered near heresy to question anything that Galen wrote. Any differences between the anatomical findings of a dissector and Galen's text (and there were many) were pushed under the carpet.

One of the very few to publicly revolt was the grandiloquently named Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493-1541), known as Paracelsus. He was a wanderer for most of his life, a practicing physician without an official qualification, a professor at the University of Basel. His early success depended on the patronage of the humanist Desiderius Erasmus and the famous printer Johann Froben, both of whom were apparently grateful patients. His self-confidence flourished, and in 1527 he threw a copy of Galen into a student's bonfire. From now on, he announced, he would teach only what he had learned from his own patients. That year his main backer, Froben, died. The establishment took its revenge, and Paracelsus had to leave town. He was pushed out of practices in other towns and died in Salzburg in 1541. He believed that, at the Creation, God had supplied a remedy for every ill, and the only reason for a physician failing to find a cure was his own ignorance. He spoke in the language of astrology; he left no school.

One man might have saved anatomy at that time, the man who in his letter of self-recommendation to Lodovico Sforza wrote, "My work will stand comparison with that of anyone else." It could, but Leonardo da Vinci was not systematic, and in any case his anatomical drawings did not reach the printing press in his time. Dr. William Hunter, the distinguished eighteenth-century anatomist who introduced the dissection of cadavers into British medical education, said that "Leonardo was the best anatomist at that time in the world. He certainly knew more than the doctors." His anatomical drawings are amazing. He invented the cross-sectional method of presentation. He made the first drawing to show the proper relationship between the small and large intestines, and he made wonderful drawings of the veins of the liver and of a dissection of the heart, "That marvelous instrument invented by the Supreme Master." Leonardo rarely mentioned God directly.

Da Vinci wrote, "The more thoroughly you describe the more thoroughly you confuse. It is necessary to draw." The seeing eye of the artist was often in those days more reliable than the tradition-bound scholasticism of the learned doctors. Da Vinci's drawings of flowers were miracles not only of art but of accuracy, as were Dürer's. But even da Vinci was under Galen's spell. His drawings of muscles and bones were the fruit only of observation, but the drawings of some of the deeper organs of the body were a cross between what the eye saw and what Galen's books described.

The man who finally saw through his own eyes, and not those of others, was Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), who established a reputation when dissecting for medical students, while he was still a teenager In 1537, at the age of twenty-three, he was already given the chair of surgery and anatomy at Padua. Early in his career, Vesalius realized that there was a gap between what he saw and what Galen wrote. He entered a period of intensive activity, it being rumored that his enthusiasm for dissection reached such heights that he dissected bodies before they were dead, like those overzealous waiters who remove your plate before you've finished eating. He employed artists, some from the school of Titian, to prepare anatomical drawings and woodcuts. Before he was thirty, Vesalius had published one of the most handsome and influential texts ever printed: De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body) (1543). By 1600 it had become the standard textbook throughout Europe, and thus it was that, in the sixteenth century, the life sciences finally made a serious break with the error-ridden past. The living eye had vanquished the dead word - although not everywhere. Avicenna's translations of Galen into Arabic were still the basis of medical practice in late-nineteenth-century Teheran.

Appropriately, the Fabrica came out in the same year as Copernicus's De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. One author had described man better than he had ever been described; the other had moved man from the center of the solar system. Naturalists began to examine nature through their own eyes, unprejudiced by medieval herbals and bestiaries. One of the great questions that they asked was this: Is there any order, any sense, in the multitude of living forms?

On the Shoulders of Giants - New York Times Book Review criticism of the book, including the first chapter. Free registration required for access.

Pedanios Dioscorides of Anazarbus - an illustrated paper on Dioscorides' life and work, including a discussion of his De Materia Medica and excerpts from its preface.

Galenus - Galen's life and science, including his studies in and contributions to anatomy, physiology, surgery, pharmacology, and philosophy.

Ancient/Classical History: Medicine - the Rome section of this Mining Company page includes links to a biography of Galen, a Galen essay on Hippocrates' On the Nature of Man, and pages from a Galenic manuscript. Also offers essays on the mysteries of Tibetan medicine; medicine in Homer; Hippocrates and Hippocratic medicine; medicine in Mesopotamia; Egyptian medicine; and more.

Galen Medicine and Pharmacy Site for Pharmacists and Doctors - includes brief biographical information and the "Galenical of The Month" - old "Galenical" formulas.

Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci - twenty-eight drawings by Leonardo, many anatomical, including a study of arms and hands; cross-sections of the human skull; a study of the womb; the organs, etc. of the female body; and the famous Vitruvian Man.

Andreas Vesaliusa - a brief biography, and an illustration of dissecting instruments from De humani corporis fabrica. More material from the Fabrica: the title page and views of the human skeleton; more history of the text, with an illustration of human musculature; a view of the human brain; nine views of human musculature and skeletal structure; and an enlarged rear view of musculature.