onsiderable fame as a surgeon, and his
fellow-citizens showed their confidence in his ability by choosing him
as surgeon to the wounded gladiators shortly after his return to his
native city. In these duties his knowledge of anatomy aided him
greatly, and he is said to have healed certain kinds of wounds that had
previously baffled the surgeons.

In the time of Galen dissections of the human body were forbidden by
law, and he was obliged to confine himself to dissections of the lower
animals. He had the advantage, however, of the anatomical works of
Herophilus and Erasistratus, and he must have depended upon them in
perfecting his comparison between the anatomy of men and the
lower animals. It is possible that he did make human dissections
surreptitiously, but of this we have no proof.

He was familiar with the complicated structure of the bones of the
cranium. He described the vertebrae clearly, divided them into groups,
and named them after the manner of anatomists of to-day. He was less
accurate in his description of the muscles, although a large number
of these were described by him. Like all anatomists before the time of
Harvey, he had a very erroneous conception of the circulation, although
he understood that the heart was an organ for the propulsion of blood,
and he showed that the arteries of the living animals did not contain
air alone, as was taught by many anatomists. He knew, also, that
the heart was made up of layers of fibres that ran in certain fixed
directions--that is, longitudinal, transverse, and oblique; but he did
not recognize the heart as a muscular organ. In proof of this he pointed
out that all muscles require rest, and as the heart did not rest it
could not be composed of muscular tissue.

Many of his physiological experiments were conducted upon scientific
principles. Thus he proved that certain muscles were under the control
of definite sets of nerves by cutting these nerves in living animals,
and observing that the muscles supplied by them were rendered useless.
He pointed out also that nerves have no power in themselves, but merely
conduct impulses to and from the brain and spinal-cord. He turned this
peculiar knowledge to account in the case of a celebrated sophist,
Pausanias, who had been under the treatment of various physicians for
a numbness in the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand. These
physicians had been treating this condition by applications of poultices
to the hand it