History of anatomy and its involvement with medical science and practice: Historical review

Abstract

The medical practice starts from Patient’s discomfort in his body structures due to distortion in morphology. This is located and examined by clinician so, medical practice and Anatomical knowledge are hand and gloves with each other. It is evident from history of Anatomy that Anatomy has been discovered by practicing physicians and surgeons. That clearly indicate that they could make the medical practice only after exploring the Anatomy. The source of knowledge of Anatomy were animal or human being as is evident from this review. The medical practice might have been started from evolution of human-being. Earlier some people were exploring the herbal medicine on the results of experiments on themselves for the effect of these medicines to treat their own discomforts. When it shewed the impact, they chose it to treat others for the same discomfort. That time they might not be knowing Anatomy but it was an empirical result. As the location of discomforts was associated with remedy so, this might have involved Anatomy. History of clinical practice and thereby Anatomy is as old as 1600BC. Earliar the people experimented on animals and then on cadavers and executed criminals. Then came different Anatomical Laws governing the use of cadavers. Now, current scenario is that there is lack of cadevers all over the world. To compensate for this, new methods including anatomage table, models and charts have been used to teach anatomy. But these novel methods can only supplement and cannot replace cadaveric dissections. It is very essential to know how Anatomy evolved and took present shape. This encouraged the author to review history of Anatomy and correlate with the simultaneously running clinical practice. The development of Anatomy has been presented along with its advancement with development of science and technology involved with medical education and clinical practice. Thus, Anatomy is not merely an academic subject in medical education rather Anatomy is needed to grasp all the subjects of medical education used to develop clinical skill for clinical practice. This has also been supported by history of Anatomy as all other subjects of medical education evolved from Anatomy. The interwoven interrelations between these subjects with clinical practice are essential as revealed by history of Anatomy to analyse the diagnosis and treatment.