The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

by Arthur Herman

Following Aristotle’s example with animals, he turned to dissection to discover what was going on inside the human frame. His curiosity was insatiable. Some ancient sources claim he turned to human vivisection in his work, including experiments on criminals handed over to him by the Ptolemaic government.7 Are the stories true? Given the fact that a couple of centuries later Galen mentions testing new poisons on condemned criminals, and the fact that slaves were routinely tortured to extract information in legal cases, there is no reason to doubt them. Centuries later, the Christian critic Origen blamed Herophilus for carrying free scientific inquiry too far and called him “that butcher who cut up innumerable human beings so that he could study nature.” It was a first hint of the battles to come between religion and science over what we call medical ethics.8 It may be unfair to Herophilus to have Jack Kevorkian or Josef Mengele hovering over his reputation. Certainly the corpus of his anatomical writings might have been scientific Alexandria’s greatest gift to posterity, if it had not perished in the great fire that devastated large portions of the Great Library in 48 BCE.†9