ANTIQUITY AND THE HELLENISTIC AGE

In the development of thought about the bodies of men and animals there came a time when the age-old acceptance of undifferentiated body-substance, the biblical ‘flesh of rams’ or the meat on which Homeric heroes feasted, gave place to a realisation that it consisted of individual muscles. How early did this happen and when was the function of these muscles as instruments of movement realised? With these questions our story naturally begins.

The Hippocratic collection of writings on medicine and its philosophy, by a number of writers of his school as well as perhaps by Hippocrates of Cos himself, was put together before the end of the third century B.C. and includes works of the two previous centuries, some indeed containing ideas from still earlier times. There is thus no such thing as a single system of thought to be found in them; the different treatises of the Corpus, some sixty in number all told, represent several different, and even opposing, schools. Three of them have been attributed by some distinguished scholars to the great physician of Cos himself, and eight more are considered to date from his time (460 to 380 B.C.). The only certainly pre-Hippocratic one is the ‘Sevens’, a prognostic text which implies the humoral theory of disease and the doctrine of critical days.

In these Greek writings the tendons (which were confused with nerves) were endowed with the power of causing movement. In fact the same word neuron was used indiscriminately for both, just as phlebes was used indifferently for the veins and the arteries.