Alcmaeon's Accomplishments

The big question everyone has been wondering for centuries and centuries to come is, “How did humans advance so far in science?”. It all had to start with an understanding of ourselves first rather than our surroundings. That is where the understanding of our anatomy comes in. Anatomy is the study concerned with the bodily structure of humans and other living organisms. Anatomy has been studied for over many centuries and we have barely skimmed the surface of this vast branch of science. There are still many unanswered questions waiting to be discovered and solved everyday. The human race has improved very far because of these great achievements and advanced studies contributed by pioneer scientists all over the globe in many different times …show more content…
Alcmaeon, who was also known as the original father of anatomy, was born in Crotone, Italy at around the fifth century B.C. His studies and theories were all far ahead of their time. He was thought to excise the eyeball of an animal and observed the insides of the eye such as the channels and the optic nerves which lead back to the brain. He was also the first to observe arteries and veins in his animal dissections were different which contradicted other scientists’ theories in his time. Another important scientist that contributed more information centuries after Alcmaeon was Andreas Vesalius who was later known as the father of modern anatomy. He was born in Brussels which is now a part of Belgium. Vesalius practiced medicine at both the University Louvain and the University of Paris. He later obtained his medical degree from the University of Padua. Vesalius later came back to the University of Padua as a professor. He was the scientist who renewed the practice of human dissection which was banned by the Catholic Church. Due to this crucial information, it …show more content…
Without knowing how our body works, or how it can go wrong, we cannot begin to create effective treatments to prevent or predict the outcome of fatal diseases. For example, MIT researchers have been developing a computer system that uses demographic, genetic, and clinical data to help predict effects of diseases on brain anatomy. In multiple tedious experiments, they trained a system on MRI data with neurodegenerative diseases from many different patients. They then found out that supplementing that training with other patient information improved the system's predictions. In some special cases that deals with drastic changes in the brain’s anatomy, the additional data cut the predictions' error rate from twenty percent to ten