Marc Zarate IV Exodus

06-21-11

1. Hippocrates - He became known as the founder of medicine and was regarded as the greatest physician of his time. He based his medical practice on observations and on the study of the human body. He held the belief that illness had a physical and a rational explanation. He rejected the views of his time that considered illness to be caused by superstitions and by possession of evil spirits and disfavor of the gods.

2. Aristotle - His philosophy laid out an approach to the investigation of all natural phenomena, to determine form by detailed, systematic work, and thus arrive at final causes. His logical method of argument gave a framework for putting knowledge together, and deducing new results. He created what amounted to a fully-fledged professional scientific enterprise, on a scale comparable to a modern university science department. It must be admitted that some of his work - unfortunately, some of the physics - was not up to his usual high standards. He evidently found falling stones a lot less interesting than living creatures. Yet the sheer scale of his enterprise, unmatched in antiquity and for centuries to come, gave an authority to all his writings.

3. Claudius Galen - He had a great knowledge of human muscles. This was something he built up working as a physician at a gladiators school in Turkey. Through dissection, he learnt that if nerves were cut, muscles responsed differently. He proved that urine was formed in the kidneys. Before, doctors had thought it was formed in the bladder. He recognised that tuberculosis was contagious. Galen's most lasting technique - one that is still practised by doctors today - is taking the pulse of a patient.

4. Andreas Vesalius - He received his education at Louvain, and studied medicine at Montpellier and Paris before returning to Louvain to teach anatomy. After spending some time in France as an army surgeon to Charles V, Vesalius travelled to Italy to continue his studies, later becoming professor of anatomy at Padua. He also taught in Bologna and Pisa. At the age of only twenty eight, he published his Fabrica and Epitome. After being called to the court of Charles V, he was soon after occupying the post of army surgeon again. After returning to Italy, and following trips

to Brussels and Basel, he spent some time in Madrid at the court of Philip II as his physician in ordinary. A pilgrimage to Jerusalem was to be Vesalius last journey. While on the island of Cyprus he received a call to Padua to occupy the chair of Fallopius.

5. William Harvey - His great achievement was the demonstration of the circulation of the blood, a discovery which replaced centuries of theory and speculation with knowledge firmly based on accurate observation and experiment. His work was of vital importance in illustrating the sequence of hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion which has governed all medical discovery since his time. He was the founder of modern physiology.

6. Marcello Malpighi - As we know that Harvey inferred correctly the presence of capillary circulation but Marcello Malpighi could never see that. He saw the spectacle of blood through network of smaller tubes on surface of lungs and of distended urine bladder of frog. That was the time, when we hadnt good quality microscope and you should not be surprised to know that fact that it almost took four years to reach on a clear conclusion of corpuscles of frogs blood.

7. Charles Darwin - Provided scientific evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from one or a few common ancestors via natural selection. His book "On the Origin of Species" established evolution by common descent as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. He examined human evolution and sexual selection in his books entitled "The Descent of Man" and "Selection in Relation to Sex". On his 5 year Beagle survey, he noted a rich variety of geological features, fossils and living organisms, and methodically collected an enormous number of specimens, many of them new to science. His studies as a geologist solved the puzzle of the formation of coral atolls.