Education; Priestley, Joseph, 1733-1804; Science -- Study and teaching
The great man whose name is inseparably connected with the foundation
of medicine, Hippocrates, certainly knew very little, indeed
practically nothing, of anatomy or physiology; and he would, probably,
have been perplexed even to imagine the possibility of a connection
between the zoological studies of his contemporary Democritus and
medicine. Nevertheless, in so far as he, and those who worked before
and after him, in the same spirit, ascertained, as matters of
experience, that a wound, or a luxation, or a fever, presented such and
such symptoms, and that the return of the patient to health was
facilitated by such and such measures, they established laws of nature,
and began the construction of the science of pathology. All true
science begins with empiricism--though all true science is such
exactly, in so far as it strives to pass out of the empirical stage
into that of the deduction of empirical from more general truths. Thus,
it is not wonderful, that the early physicians had little or nothing to
do with the development of biological science; and, on the other hand,
that the early biologists did not much concern themselves with
medicine. There is nothing to show that the Asclepiads took any
prominent share in the work of founding anatomy, physiology, zoology,
and botany. Rather do these seem to have sprung from the early
philosophers, who were essentially natural philosophers, animated by
the characteristically Greek thirst for knowledge as such. Pythagoras,
Alcmeon, Democritus, Diogenes of Apollonia, are all credited with
anatomical and physiological investigations; and, though Aristotle is
said to have belonged to an Asclepiad family, and not improbably owed
his taste for anatomical and zoological inquiries to the teachings of
his father, the physician Nicomachus, the "Historia Animalium," and the
treatise "De Partibus Animalium," are as free from any allusion to
medicine as if they had issued from a modern biological laboratory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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