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Medicine and Other Empirical Sciences

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The Forgotten Revolution
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Abstract

Among the medical schools of classical Greece the most famous was that founded in the fifth century B.C. by Hippocrates of Cos. It played an important role in freeing medicine from magic and religious practices and in founding medical ethics. But Hippocratic thinking remained in the realm of techne, or professional medical practice, which it essentially founded; it did not generate autonomous sciences (in our sense). The key novelty of Hellenistic medicine was the creation, in the first half of the third century B.C., of anatomy and physiology based on the dissection of the human body. This was done by Herophilus of Chalcedon, active in Alexandria, and by Erasistratus of Ceos.

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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Russo, L. (2004). Medicine and Other Empirical Sciences. In: The Forgotten Revolution. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18904-3_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18904-3_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20396-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-18904-3

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