The Shelves · Medicine

Anatomy, On Pulses, Midwifery and other works

Known · Attestedin Alexandria?Conjecturedvery likely classLegend · Told storya told story on its tag

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I · The entry, in his form

In the table of Medicine

Conjecturedvery likely class

Herophilus of Chalcedon

c. 330–260 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.

Anatomy, On Pulses, Midwifery and other works

Opening words not preserved.

Length: not counted

Above, his entry form, filled from what we know. Below, ours.

II · Does it survive? Where to read it

Survives in fragments

Was it in Alexandria?

Known · Attested

Written in Alexandria.

In the cupboard: written at Alexandria by a scholar or court writer a source places there.

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III · In the show

The show has not yet spoken of this work.

IV · Sources and the living entry

Ancient references (4)
  • Celsus, On Medicine, proem 23-26
  • Celsus, On Medicine, proem 74
  • Tertullian, On the Soul 10.4
  • Galen, passim
Modern scholarship (2)
  • H. von Staden, Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
  • V. Nutton, Ancient Medicine, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2013)

Entry checked 31 Oct 2026 · no corrections · Suggest a correction ›

ANATOMY, ON PULSES, MIDWIFERY AND OTHER WORKS

Read what is told

The back of the tag: a story told of this work, in its teller's voice.

Legend: told story

Criminals from the king's prisons

Celsus tells, some three centuries later, that the kings handed Herophilus and Erasistratus condemned criminals from their prisons to cut open alive, as the physicians who defended the practice claimed; Tertullian, around 210 CE, says Herophilus dissected six hundred people.

Told by Celsus, c. 30 CE, some three centuries later

What the evidence supports

Herophilus's anatomical discoveries in Alexandria are attested in Galen and others, and human dissection there is generally accepted. Celsus passes on the defenders' own claim and condemns it; Tertullian writes as an enemy of anatomy. Whether living people were cut open is still debated.

Sources (2)
  • Celsus, On Medicine prooemium 23–26, 74
  • Tertullian, On the Soul 10.4
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Beside it in the cupboard