Hippocrates Vs Harvey Research Paper

Hippocrates vs. Harvey
In two thousand years, everything can change. Two thousand years ago, the Romans ruled the Western world with an iron fist. Now, Italy sits in the shadow of its more powerful neighbors, previous Roman colonies such as England and Germany. Two thousand years ago, Jesus was crucified at Golgotha. Two thousand years later, Christianity has an estimated 2.2 billion followers. Similarly, in the year 370 with the death of Hippocrates, people understood the body as a complex mixture of humors that combined with the elements of their world. Nearly two thousand years later, in the sixteenth century, William Harvey completely revolutionized the world’s understanding of the body. Although they both studied the nature of the body and its functions, Hippocrates and Harvey differed greatly in their opinions; Hippocrates believed in the external views of
Hippocrates’ views on the human body came from external views and observations of the sick. In the ancient world, excepting Alexandria, human dissection was considered amoral and taboo, and as such Hippocrates was unable to look inside the human body to examine the makeup of humans. So, he found two ways to study the body. Firstly, he dissected animals such as pigs and dogs (pigs were an especially good choice because of their anatomical similarity to humans) For example, in “The Nature of Man,” Hippocrates notes, “In those cases where there is a spontaneous discharge of bloody urine, it indicates rupture of a small vein in the kidneys.” We know that Hippocrates did not discover ruptured kidneys from fresh corpses, and so it indicates that such a discovery came from the dissection of an animal. Hippocrates’ knowledge of organs mostly came from his examinations of animals, for there was no other way for him to examine the body’s