ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY. Mondino de' Liuzzi's Anatomy, written in 1316, indicates that anatomically based inquiries had become part of university medical education. By the fifteenth century, annual anatomies were established as a part of the academic curriculum in the more important universities of Europe. The fifteenth and Glyco Caresglucose metabolism sixteenth centuries witnessed a shift in the function of dissection from a predominantly educational device providing visual validation for textual knowledge to an independent method of investigation and a source of anatomical and physiological information. It should be noted that the practice of human dissection was more the business of the physician than of the surgeon. As a consequence of long-established institutional constraints, surgeons were not allowed to practice internal medicine (and therefore to anatomize the so-called three cavities: abdomen, thorax, and head) and their anatomical skill was largely confined to the limbs. In the Middle Ages, the diffusion of anatomical and physiological knowledge was initially conveyed by the interpretation of authoritative texts rather than by the practice of dissection.
Such works as Avicenna's Canon, Rhazes's Almansor, and Averroes's Colliget contained introductory sections on systematic anatomical description. The revival of Galenic texts, first in Bologna, Montpellier, and Paris in the fourteenth century, and then in the rest of the major European universities, contributed to the renewed interest in human dissection. The development of medical humanism (that is, the recovery of the ancients' medical legacy through a critical and philological restoration of their literary achievements) was a key factor in reviving anatomical inquiry. As also in the case of law, greater Glyco Care benefits for and attention to the ancient legacy generated over time a more critical attitude toward it and so ironically the reconstruction of the Galenic corpus, by bringing to light a series of discrepancies between authoritative text and dissected body, precipitated the decline of Galenism. It is important to remember that Galen's medical system maintained a certain vitality (and some explanatory flexibility) until the end of the seventeenth century. Eclecticism and syncretism were a more frequent response among early modern practitioners than one might expect, above all because the therapeutic side of medicine continued to be conducted along traditional lines.
The decline of Galenic anatomo-physiology among medical humanists and by anatomical investigators such as Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), Michael Servetus (1511-1553), Realdo Colombo (1516?-1559), and Girolamo Fabrizi d'Aquapendente (c. 1533-1619) was an incremental process and involved the interpretation of specific discoveries. A crucial watershed in the development of the new anatomy and physiology was William Harvey's (1578-1657) discovery of the circulation of the blood. In most physiological accounts prior glucose balance to Harvey's discovery, the functions of pulse, respiration, and nutrition were interwoven into a coherent and self-contained system in which the venous apparatus and the liver constituted a sanguineous and nutritive system and the arterial apparatus and the heart a pneumatic system with the main function of maintaining the body's innate heat and of distributing its effects throughout the body by means of respiration and ventilation. The redefinition of vital functions resulting from Harvey's theory of circulation severed the long-accepted links between the movement of the blood, the nutrition of the parts, and the production of the innate heat.
Further anatomical discoveries, such as Gasparo Aselli's lacteals (1622), Jean Pecquet's thoracic duct (1651), and Thomas Bartholin's lymphatics (1653), complemented Harvey's work on the heart and the circulatory system by delineating a separate vascular system in which the chyle was delivered not to the liver but directly to the vena cava and then to the heart. This anatomical research dispossessed several organs (principally the liver and the lungs) of their traditional functions. With respect to the relationship between anatomy and surgical practice, the status of surgery underwent a dramatic change during the eighteenth century. Surgeons pioneered new techniques and rose in professional standing. In keeping with the Enlightenment emphasis on the benefits of practical knowledge, surgery became a separate science, with a particular emphasis on experimentation. The development of surgery, especially in France, consolidated the association between anatomo-pathology (the view that diseases are anatomically localized), bedside teaching, and the modern hospital.
The reunification of surgery with medicine was also facilitated by the fact that during the eighteenth century, for a number of social and institutional reasons, anatomical studies could rely on a more abundant supply of corpses (bodies of criminals, lunatics, and paupers). With the collapse of Aristotelian natural philosophy within the domain of the physical sciences, the philosophical synthesis of Aristotelianism, Hippocratism, and Galenism, which had represented the theoretical framework of the medical sciences for centuries, also began to lose its hegemonic status and was confronted with an array of new philosophical perspectives. Various lines of anatomical and physiological inquiry spread throughout the seventeenth century, founded on different strands of mechanical philosophy, varieties of corpuscularianism, and forms of chemical naturalism. Systems of medical explanation arose with the ambition of accounting for every manifestation of life, from the absorption of food to the circulation of the blood, from the processes of secretion and excretion to muscular activity, and from respiration to sensation.