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First Medical School

As I ponder a career in medicine, I have started researching colleges with good medical programs, which made me curious about medical schools in the past. Although the art of medicine was widely practiced in ancient civilizations, it wasn't really taught as a science until much later. It was only during the Classical period that medical schools started being established as a formal place to study the science of medicine. 

The first known medical school was built in Alexandria around 311 BCE in modern-day Egypt (which was controlled by the Greeks at the time). However, Pergamum (where Hippocrates practiced) is rumored to have had a medical school earlier than that but there is very little known about this school, so the first medical school is credited to Alexandria. The Greeks were always stronger in medicine than the Romans, and Alexandria was certainly proof of that! What is also impressive is that Alexandria School of Medicine united all the different medical doctrines including Eastern medicine, Egyptian and Greek medicine, into one common center of knowledge. Imagine what an achievement that must be in those days, before the age of the internet! Of course, Alexandria gave special importance to Hippocrates’ teachings and the first Hippocratic Corpus was collected here. 

Alexandria

History's most famous physician, Galen, graduated from Alexandria. The fact that he was heavily influenced by Hippocrates’ teachings makes sense given the fact that Alexandria focused on Hippocratic medicine. Not only did the school have great teachers, it had another feature that is almost incomparable in the study of medicine-  it was the only place that allowed dissection of human bodies in the Classical Age. Galen became famous for his demonstration of anatomical organs using animals, and now it makes perfect sense that he would experiment with animal cadavers. For a short time, the school apparently also practiced vivisection--the unimaginably cruel practice of dissection of live people, usually criminals condemned to death. 

Alexandria also had two of the most famous medical teachers of those times -- Herophilus and Erasistratus -- teaching anatomy and physiology, respectively. They were supposedly great rivals who divided the medical community into two opposing schools within Alexandria, but they also worked together, discovering the nervous system together. Adversaries working together, wow, today somehow that seems unthinkable and also unjustifiable! 

Alexandria is also famous for its library, which was the largest library of the time. It had some 700,000 written texts about medicine and philosophy, including works by Aristotle and Plato. Alexandria continued as a renowned center of medical teaching even after the Roman Empire conquered the Greeks, but the city and parts of the school were damaged during Julius Caesar’s conquest. A major fire in 389 AD destroyed the famous library, after which the school declined slowly into obscurity.

Artist's rendering of Alexandria library



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