c. 330–260 BCE · physician · anatomist
Herophilus of Chalcedon
Ἡρόφιλος
In Alexandria: c. 300–260 BCE
The first to dissect human bodies systematically, in Alexandria under the first Ptolemies. He described the brain's ventricles, the nerves, the duodenum and the ovaries, and timed the pulse with a water clock. Celsus reports that he and Erasistratus cut open living criminals given them by the kings; he gives it as the claim of the physicians who defended the practice, and himself condemns it. Whether it happened is disputed.
Their life and work
He came from Chalcedon and studied under Praxagoras of Cos before working in Alexandria. He named parts of the body that still carry his words in translation: the duodenum, the twelve-finger intestine, and the meeting of the brain's sinuses, the torcular Herophili. He distinguished nerves from tendons and the sensory from the motor nerves, and saw the brain, not the heart, as the seat of intelligence. His writings are lost; von Staden gathered the fragments from Galen, Celsus and others.
Celsus, writing under Tiberius, reports that the kings gave him and Erasistratus criminals from their prisons to cut open alive. He gives this as the claim of the physicians who defended the practice, and himself calls it cruel and needless (On Medicine, prooemium 23–26, 74). Tertullian, early in the third century, calls him 'physician or butcher' and says he cut up six hundred people (On the Soul 10.4). That human bodies were dissected in Alexandria in his time is accepted; whether living people were cut open is disputed. Known: probable, disputed
Our device: Their emblem is a scalpel. No portrait of any of these people survives. The emblems are our devices.
On the shelves
- Herophilus of Chalcedon, Anatomy, On Pulses, Midwifery and other works · c. 290–260 BCE · Survives in fragments
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Sources (4)
- Celsus, On Medicine prooemium 23–26, 74
- H. von Staden, Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria (Cambridge, 1989)
- Tertullian, On the Soul 10.4
- V. Nutton, Ancient Medicine, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2013)