Herophilus and Erasistratus

One of the first Greek doctors to carry out the dissection of a human body was Herophilus; he was born two hundred and fifty years before Christ, which just shows how long we doctors have been discovering new things. According to Herophilus, his most important discovery was that the brain controlled the body not the heart. Well, we all know that the heart is the source of the body’s innate heat and is the organ most closely related to the soul. Herophilus later discovered there is a difference between arteries and nerves, and that there are different parts to the stomach such as the duodenum and the prostate. There was another Greek doctor Erasistratus who, when dissecting a heart, noticed it had four one-way valves, and this led him to believe that the human heart was some kind of a pump, now how silly is that? Erasistratus didn’t even believe in the four humours, and let’s face it, if you can’t balance a patient’s four humours how can you possibly hope to cure them of illness? This is fundamental to our teachings.