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Hello, my name is Helen
Nicholson and I'm a professor of
anatomy at the University
of Otago in New Zealand.
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The purpose of this lecture
is to give a brief overview of
the history of anatomy and to
think about not
just gross anatomy,
but histology and imaging.
Then, to think about how we
practice or how we teach anatomy
and that can't happen without
understanding how we
acquire human cadavers and
have done so over the
years and some of
the ethical and cultural
concerns that are involved.
Then finally, I want
to talk about some of
the new technologies that have
come in, in recent years.
Let's make a start
around the history.
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People have known
about the structure of
the body for many
hundreds of years.
We know that, for example,
Charak in 300 Before
the Common Era (BCE),
he was an Indian artist and
undertook science of Ayurveda.
He had already described
that there were
360 bones within the body
and he knew that the
heart was a cavity that
connected to the rest of
the body on 13 channels.
There's evidence
even further back
from some of the
papyruses from Egypt,
so 1500/1600 years BCE
where people had
recognized the
heart and vessels,
the liver, spleen, kidneys,
hypothalamus, bladder, and they
knew that the heart
was the center of
the blood supply and that was
connected to the vessel
by vessels to each limb.
So, it's an old art anatomy,
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but sometimes when we think
about the history of anatomy,
we don't go much further back
than people like Hippocrates.
Hippocrates was Greek and he is
often called the
"Father of Medicine".
He knew about the
detailed knowledge of
the skeletal and muscular
structures in the body.
Soon after him, people like
Herophilus and
Erasistratus of Ceos,
they started to undertake
dissections of humans.
They didn't always, it
appears wage for
the humans to die,
but they undertook
dissections and they
started to do systematic
dissections of
human cadavers and
it was a man called
Theophrastus who was
the first to give
what we now call anatomy,
the name 'anatomy'.
