I. The Scope of Anatomy and Physiology
A. Anatomy – The study of form
1. There are several ways to examine the human body
a. Inspection; just looking at the body’s apperance
b. Palpation; touching or listening to the body
c. Auscultation; listening to the natural sounds made by the body such as heart or lung sounds
d. Percussion; tapping the body and listening for abnormal sounds indicating pockets of fluid or air
e. Dissection; the careful cutting and separation of tissues to reveal their relationships. Comparative anatomy explores more than one species to examine similarities and differences and analyze evolutionary trends
f. Exploratory surgery; opening the body in order to see what is wrong and to see what an be done to fix it
g. Medical imaging (radiology); the ability to examine the internal structure of the body without surgery
2. Visible structure(s) seen by any of these techniques is called gross anatomy
3. Microscopic structural study is called histology
a.. Histopathology, the histology of diseased tissue
b. Cytology, the study of cellular structure and function
c. Ultrastructure, the study of fine detail down to the molecular level
B. Physiology – The study of function; often divided into subdisciplines. Comparative physiology is used to understand human physiology without human experimentation or to observe evolutionary trends between species
II. The Origins of Biomedical Science
A. The Greek and Roman legacy
1. Hippocrates; the “father of medicine” who established a code of ethics for physicians and sought natural causes for disease instead of whims of the gods
2. Aristotle; called disease from natural causes physici or physiology the source of these terms in modern medicine. Aristotle also described anatomy of different animals and themes in nature.
3. Galen; physician to the gladiators, he wrote the most influential text on medicine for several hundred years. He proposed that individuals make their own observations rather than accepting other’s facts. The opposite happened with his text on medicine.
B. The birth of modern medicine began in the later middle ages. Until then, medicine was taught as a dogmatic repetition of the works of Galen and Aristotle.
1. Maimonides; born in the 10th century, he was physician to the sultan Saladin, and wrote several medical books and treatises on specific diseases.
2. Avicenna; a Muslim medical scholar, he wrote The Canon of Medicine which became the leading authority in European medical schools for 500 years. He had read Galen and Aristotle and combined their findings with his own observations and questioned authority when the evidence demanded it.
3. Vesalius; a 14th century anatomist, departed from the customs of his day to do his own dissections and pointed out the mistakes in the works of Galen. He published his own text of human anatomy with accurate illustrations.
4. Harvey and Servetus initiated studies in the science of experimental physiology with studies on the circulation of blood, contradicting the ideas of Galen
5. Hooke made many improvements in the compound light microscope and in other instruments. Using his instruments, Hooke was the first to describe cells.
6. Van Leeuwenhoek; the inventor of the simple (single lens) microscope.
7. Carl Zeiss and Ernst Abbe improved the compound light microscope, adding the condenser and improving the optics.
8. Schleiden and Schwann were the first to observe that all organisms were composed of cells, the first tenet of the cell theory.
C. Living in a revolution – today important discoveries in biology and biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology have revolutionized the practice of diagnostics and disease treatment, but the people above established the methods used to learn facts in a dependable way with repeatable results; in other words, the scientific method.
III. Scientific Method; Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes began the discipline of scientific investigation with the emphasis of observable and repeatable
