Emphasis on Pathology
from Part II - Basic Knowledge, Sixteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2022
How to approach care of patients? Galen’s idea of humors, miasma, and natural influences affecting health and disease held sway for centuries. The methods of science – observation, hypothesis generation, experimentation, careful review of results, and then, revision of hypotheses and concepts – began to take hold in various academic centers in Europe and Asia during an age of enlightenment. Andreus Vesalius had shown how the study of human anatomy should be conducted (Chapter 4). William Harvey had shown how knowledge about human physiology should be approached (Chapter 5), and Thomas Willis had reinforced the need for a scientific approach to anatomy and experimentation as an important predecessor to caring for patients (Chapter 6). But it was Giovanni Battista Morgagni who put the final nail in the coffin of the Galenian approach to medicine. Morgagni emphasized examination of the body after death, to determine pathology, as a critical way of identifying disease and contributing importantly to knowledge. Anatomy, physiology, and pathology were the triad of disciplines that lead to the understanding of disease.
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