IMPORTANT EVENTS THAT PRECEDED THE RENAISSANCE--EARLY ATTEMPTS TO DISSECT THE HUMAN BODY _Important Events Immediately Preceding the Renaissance._--Three hundred years before the Christian era Erasistratus and Herophilus made, at Alexandria, Egypt, an attempt to develop a correct knowledge of anatomy by means of dissections of human corpses, but the political and religious conditions at that time were not favorable to scientific work, and therefore the success attained was of a very restricted character. Then, during the succeeding three or four centuries, this early movement gradually died out, and no further contributions to our knowledge of human anatomy were made until toward the end of the second century of the present era, at which time Claudius Galen, a man of giant intellect and tireless energy, did his best to supply the anatomical knowledge so urgently needed. But the deeply rooted prejudices of that age against dissections of the human body lay like an insurmountable barrier across his path and forced him to confine his efforts to the dissection of those animals whose bodily construction resembled more or less closely that of man. Galen believed that the anatomy which he thus evolved for the guidance of his professional brethren would satisfy all their legitimate wants of this nature, and he proceeded to build upon this faulty and unstable foundation an equally faulty physiology. History records the extraordinary fact that Galen’s belief in the sufficiency of his anatomy and physiology for all the reasonable needs of physicians and surgeons was so well grounded that during the following thirteen or fourteen centuries nobody dared to cast the slightest suspicion upon the trustworthiness of these foundations of the science of medicine. Then followed, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an awakening which seemed to affect all departments of human activity. This movement, which is commonly termed the “Renaissance,” developed at first very slowly, and reached a noteworthy degree of momentum only toward the middle of the fifteenth century, about which time there occurred several events that contributed greatly to strengthen and perpetuate the movement. Such were, for example, the employment of gunpowder in the wars of Western Europe; the invention of a method of manufacturing paper--a discovery which led to the abandonment of the much more expensive parchment, and prepared the way for the invention of printing in its different forms; the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453; the discovery of America in 1492; and, finally, the Reformation inaugurated by Martin Luther. Let us pass in review very briefly each of these events, in order that we may the better appreciate how the science of medicine, in the short space of time represented by a couple of centuries, made a greater advance than it had previously made in the course of several hundred years.