Doctors as well as scientists combined observation with theory during the Hellenistic period. Herophilus, who lived in the first half of the third century B.C.E., worked at Alexandria and studied the writings attributed to Hippocrates (see “The Flowering of Philosophy” in Chapter 3). He accepted Hippocrates’s theory of the four humors and approached the study of medicine in a systematic, scientific fashion: he dissected dead bodies and measured what he observed. He was the first to accurately describe the nervous system, and he differentiated between motor and sensory nerves. Herophilus also studied the brain, which he considered the center of intelligence, and discerned the cerebrum and cerebellum. His other work dealt with the liver, lungs, and uterus. His younger contemporary Erasistratus also conducted research on the brain and nervous system and improved on Herophilus’s work. Erasistratus, too, followed in the tradition of Hippocrates and believed that the best way for the body to heal itself was through diet and air. To learn more about human anatomy, Herophilus and Erasistratus dissected corpses, and may even have dissected living criminals, provided for them by the Egyptian kings. They were probably the only scientists in antiquity to dissect human bodies, though animal dissection became very common in the Roman period.

Because Herophilus and Erasistratus followed the teachings of Hippocrates, later writers on medicine labeled them “Dogmatists” or the “Dogmatic school,” from the Greek word dogma, or philosophical idea. Along with their hands-on study of the human body, the Dogmatists also speculated about the nature of disease and argued that there were sometimes hidden causes for illness. Opposing them was an “Empiric school” begun by a student of Herophilus, doctors who held observation and experiment to be the only way to advance medical knowledge and viewed the search for hidden causes as useless. Later Greek and Roman physicians sometimes identified themselves with one or the other of these ways of thinking, but the labels were also sometimes simply used as insults to dismiss the ideas of a rival.

Whether undertaken by Dogmatists or Empiricists, medical study did not lead to effective cures for the infectious diseases that were the leading cause of death for most people, however, and people used a variety of ways to attempt to combat illness. Medicines prescribed by physicians or prepared at home often included natural products blended with materials understood to work magically. One treatment for fever, for example, was the liver of a cat killed when the moon was waning and preserved in salt. People also invoked Asclepius, the god of medicine, in healing rituals, or focused on other deities who were understood to have power over specific illnesses. (See “Primary Source 4.5: Physician with Young Patient.”) They paid specialists to devise spells that would cure them or prevent them from becoming ill in the first place (see page 109). Women in childbirth gathered their female friends and relatives around them, and in larger cities could also hire experienced midwives who knew how to decrease pain and assist in the birthing process if something went wrong. People in the Hellenistic world may have thought that fate determined what would happen, but they also actively sought to make their lives longer and healthier.