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The history of anatomy and the practice of anatomy (including imaging)

Published on December 31, 2023   25 min

A selection of talks on Clinical Practice

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0:00
Hello, my name is Helen Nicholson and I'm a professor of anatomy at the University of Otago in New Zealand.
0:08
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.
0:39
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,
1:31
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'.

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The history of anatomy and the practice of anatomy (including imaging)

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