You could say the first anatomist was anybody who peered inside a corpse, but our question is more about the people who recorded what they learned.
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The earliest known texts was written in Ancient Egyptian, dating to 1600 BCE.
They described the heart, vessels and some parts of the brain. They noted major organs such as the liver, spleen, kidneys, uterus and bladder.
Herophilus and Erasistratus were anatomists in the third century who pioneered human dissection for medical research. A key understanding was not just classifying and placing organs, but understand that each performs a particular function.
Erasistratus could see that air entered the lungs, which connect to the heart, and then throughout the body via arteries and veins.
He discovered that the nervous system comprises sensory and the motor nerves.
Between them, Herophilus and Erasistratus catalogued a large number of organs, from heart valves, eye, liver, reproductive organs and even the epiglottis.
One of Herophilus' insights is interesting because it reveals the logical fallacy that asserts a thing must be true because it's the word of an authority.
Although Aristotle was undoubtedly a towering intellect, he was completely wrong about the purpose of the brain.
It was, he said, a "cooling chamber", but Herophilus found that it is in fact the seat of intellect.
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In the 2nd century, Galen compiled what became the authoritative treatise, which is where anatomy pretty much sat for the next thousand years.
Today we would consider his practice of vivisection largely unacceptable because it involved procedures on living animals, especially dogs.
It unfortunately also contained many errors because much of his work was based not on humans, but on animals such as barbary apes.
As you might guess, there are some quirky characters in this story.
Herophilus designed a water clock to measure pulse. Galen wrote that exercise affects heart rate and improves fitness. He observed gladiators' hearts as they died.
That changed in 1543 when Andreas Vesalius transformed the study of medicine with his 800-page magnum opus, De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (On the fabric of the human body in seven books).
All this leads to the deeply mysterious question: how do cells in your body know how and where to grow? How does a liver cell know, not just that it's a liver cell, but that it connects to a blood vessel?
The answer is partly genetics, but there's much we still don't understand.
When you consider that a human body comprises some 36 trillion cells, it's a stupendous feat of organisation.
The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is on 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM. Send your questions to AskFuzzy@Zoho.com; Podcast: FuzzyLogicOn2xx.Podbean.com
