page_title: Alexandria School of Medicine
section_title: Erasistratus
hierarchical_section_title: Alexandria School of Medicine / History / Erasistratus
context_page_description: Alexandria Medical School is one of the oldest empirical educational institutions in the history of medicine initiated during the Hellenistic period in ancient Greece in the city of Alexandria 311 BC. At one historical juncture, in Egypt, they united all the different medical doctrines that originated in the East and in Alexandria, and merged into one universal "critical mass of knowledge" the Alexandrian empirical school. As the Alexandria School grows more developed Medical Schools in Knossos and in Knidos over time lost their meaning and significance.
context_section_description: Erasistratus (304-250 BC), a Greek physician who grew up in Antioch, was a great anatomist of that time, who described the numerous anatomical structures of the human body. He was a young contemporary of Herophilos and, with him, the principal representative of the Alexandrian Medical School.
  He systematically dissected the corpses, the death row convicts, and probably the bodies of living animals, and thus scientifically advanced the anatomy. He described the heart and its valves, blood vessels and nerves, the brain and its chambers and eddies, brain nerve outputs, lymphatic vessels in the mesentery and liver.
  However, Erasistratus's greatest merits are in the field of Physiology. He was the first to correctly describe the physiological functions of ventricular heart valves. Under the influence of the Democritus of atomistics and the peripatetic school, he sought to interpret all life phenomena in a strictly mechanical manner. In his view, three organ systems pass through and are connected by the whole organism: arteries, veins and nerves; the first water pneuma, the second blood, and the third the nerve fluid. The melting of the pneuma down it was reduced to the mechanical work of the heart.
  He also tried to explain to the mechanical principles breathing and digestion. The former realized the difference between motor and sensory nerves, and he "threw out" Hippocrates learning, and advocated the use of weak drugs.
  Erasistratus rejected the humoral and pathology of the "four juices", starting from the view that the diseases were the result of accumulation of blood (plethora) or its deficiency in some part of the body, which resulted in humoral dyscrasia. According to him, the plethora is a vein full of blood, which flows into the arteries and mechanically expels the pneuma there.
  As most of the diseases, Erasistratus considered to be due to over-nutrition, he suggested that not much release be used against the plethora
  blood as a post.
caption: Erasistratus reveals cause of disease in Antiochus.
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