In the study of
osteology, he urges the student to be on the lookout for an occasional
human bone exposed in a graveyard, and on one occasion he tells of
finding the carcass of a robber with the bones picked bare by birds and
beasts. Failing this source, he advises the student to go to Alexandria,
where there were still two skeletons. He himself dissected chiefly
apes and pigs. His osteology was admirable, and his little tractate "De
Ossibus" could, with very few changes, be used today by a hygiene class
as a manual. His description of the muscles and of the organs is very
full, covering, of course, many sins of omission and of commission, but
it was the culmination of the study of the subject by Greek physicians.
His work as a physiologist was even more important, for, so far as we
know, he was the first to carry out experiments on a large scale. In the
first place, he was within an ace of discovering the circulation of
the blood. You may remember that through the errors of Praxagoras and
Erasistratus, the arteries were believed to contain air and got their
name on that account: Galen showed by experiment that the arteries
contain blood and not air. He studied particularly the movements of
the heart, the action of the valves, and the pulsatile forces in the
arteries.
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