The thorax in history. 4. Human dissection and anatomical progress.

We saw in the last article that no contribution was made in the early Western middle ages to the medical sciences of anatomy and physiology. The "knowledge " of the learned consisted of strangely metamorphosed relics of ancient learning in literary and pictorial forms. The bulk of Hellen-istic science was preserved by the Arabs. The period covered by this article-the later middle ages and the earlier renaissance-can be divided approximately into three: from ignorance to confusion, from scholasticism to scholarship, and from authority to progress. Each of these refers to a new assimilation of old knowledge, and only at the end of our period do we find the pro-duction of new knowledge from observation taking