Adam Ruins Everything - Why Anatomy Was Taught Incorrectly For 1000 Years | truTV 

I turned up the volume because the sound was low, and the ending music jumpscared me

Well considering at the time it was highly illegal and immoral to desecrate a human body, Id say Galen did all he could.

I like how he went teenage girl on galen xD "I HATE YOU GALEN I HATE YOUUU"

So basically that guy was the Adam ruins everything of that time

Man, who knew that Galen, a Greek physician who was in an Empire who banned dissecting humans, and a time where looking at different parts of the body was hard due to the technology at the time, was wrong.

boyyy were they wrong

I hope he explains why galen did not operate on humans. It was it was considered taboo in ancient rome.

They're not criticising Galen for being wrong, they're criticising the educational system that didn't check if he was right until 1000+ years later. Galen obviously couldn't dissect humans, but people didn't confirm his theories even after they could.

“Galen says that there’s five lobes on the liver, but I only see two!” Actually Galen was closer to the actual amount, there’s 4 lobes in the liver.

There was actually considerable advance on the work of Galen and this happened centuries before Vesalius. Like all scholarship, the study of medicine went into a steep decline soon after Galen's time, particularly in the western half of the Roman Empire. The upheavals and chaos of the third century AD affected the western half of the Empire very badly economicially and socially and all forms of scholarship began to decline from this point onward. The political recovery of the fourth century saw greater stability, but no great improvement in scholarship. Then came the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century and the centuries of invasion, disintergration and chaos that followed. The formal, academic study of medicine went into a steep decline in this period and much that had been known was lost. But not everything. Benedictine monasteries had a strong tradition of the preservation of learning and also maintained infirmaries for the treatment of the monks and the rest of their community. This meant that some works of ancient medicine survived the collapse of learning in the fall of the Western Empire. Thanks to scholars like Cassiodorus (c. 485 - c. 585) and Isidore of Seville (c. 560 - 636, Latin summaries or editions of key works of Greek and Hellenic medicine did survive. Thus at least parts of the work of Hippocrates, Dioscorides and Galen were preserved and studied. European folk medicine and herb lore was added to this small corpus during the Carolingian revival in the ninth and tenth centuries, and Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) wrote her Causae et Curae, with a long list of cures that ranged from herbal to magical, but many of which seem to have been effective. But the real revival of the formal study of medicine came in the eleventh century, when the influx of formerly lost Greek works via Arabic translations as well as works by Muslims on medical subjects began to find their way into Europe via scholars who travelled to Spain and worked in Sicily to make Latin translations of them. In this way Nemesius' Premnon Fisicon and Galen's Art of Medicine, Therapeutics and other works had a major impact on the flowering of scholarship that took place in western Europe in the twelfth century. Medical schools began to spring up alongside the new universities or as medical faculties within them. Salerno emerged as the first major medical school, with Roger of Salerno as its most famed surgeon. But soon there were also major medical centres of study at Montpellier, Bologna, Padua and Paris as well. Hippocrates and Galen were the most esteemed ancient "authorities" in these schools, but the work of Muslim and Jewish doctors was also carefully studied, including that of Avicenna, Isaac Israeli, Al-Rhazi, Albucasis, Hunain ibn Ishaq and Haly Abbas. Medieval doctors did not just follow the works of others, but also made advances of their own. The use of mild anaesthetics appear in medical texts as early as the twelfth century, with various versions and improvements on a recipe based on opium, mandragora and henbane appearing over the next few centuries. Various forms of surgery were practiced, with suturing of wounds and more delicate operations, such as sewing together nerves and various forms of eye surgery successfully carried out. Opinion was divided on the best way to encourage wounds to heal, with a range of medieval doctors opposing Galen's prescription of using salves to promote what he considered "healthy supperation". Hugh and Theodoric Borgognoni, Henry of Mondeville and Bruno of Longoburgo all rejected Galen's treatement, insisting on washing a wound with wine, suturing it and keeping it clean, aired and dry. Unfortunarely many other doctors followed the influential Guy de Chauliac in continuing Galen's far less effective approach. The area in which medieval doctors were greatly in advance of Galen and the ancients was anatomy. Galen, like almost all ancient doctors, operated in a society with strong taboos about dead bodies and in which human dissection was completely forbidden. As a result, his anatomical knowledge was based on the dissection of apes, pigs and dogs and was, unsurprisingly, often very wrong. Medieval doctors had no such taboos and the bodies of executed criminals came to be dissected on an fairly routine basis - no student at the Medical Faculty of Montpellier could graduate unless he had completed a human dissection. As a result, anatomical knowledge improved vastly and works like Mondino of Luzzi's (c.1275-1326) Anatomia and Guy de Chauliac's Chirurgia Magna became the key anatomical texts before the time of Vesalius. Like all pre-modern medical practicioners, these medieval scholars were still tied to the ancient Greek model of the four humours and their mystical connection to the cosmos via astrology. This meant medieval doctors were not bad at diagnosis and were better than their ancient counterparts at anatomy and physiology, but they were as bad as the ancient Greeks and Romans at actually curing anyone simply because their theoretical model was wrong. What the improved study of anatomy via careful dissection and observation did achieve, however, was to lay the foundations of medicine as an empirical science, which in turn made modern medicine possible. When Vesalius exposed many of Galen's errors he was not a radical innovator who was doing this for the first time (as some popular works maintain) but an heir to a centuries old tradition of correcting Galen's work. Image: i1.wp.com/library.hrmtc.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/carruthers-the-book-of-memory-cambridge.jpg?resize=350%2C200 References: www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/greek/greek_galen.html www.famousscientists.org/galen/ plato.stanford.edu/entries/galen/ www.britannica.com/biography/Galen-of-Pergamum www.iep.utm.edu/galen/

I might be wrong, but I think he used dogs and monkeys because he wasn’t aloud to go cut and open up human bodies.

Tbh, the desection of humans wasn't exactly accepted till the rennesance... Also, as a fun fact, england didn't see a problem with graverobing for quite some time, I'm fact, people made an honest days work by graverobing, horrific ain't it?

I think it's important to remember this was only part of the world; other civilizations and societies like the Egyptians were doing great work on the human anatomy and medicine, though also to varying success.

Galen was restricted to the moral standards of the time. He did the best he could with the information he had at the time.

Human ignorance knows no limits

Nobody questioned Galen. This is madness!

Err....love the show, but there is a tini tiny thing that they simply forgot to mention called "Catholic Church" which made it forbidden to disect the human body. So...yeah...it wasnt because people were stupid. They just couldn't imspect the human body. Cheers.

I think it's important to remember that Galen came from another time and that while it's easy to misunderstand his teachings to make him look like a quack it would be imperative that one ask if it wasn't the scholars of the later period who simply misunderstood his work and it's intended purpose.

I love how emotionally invested Adam is by the end. 1000 YEARS!

This isn't really Adam Ruins Everything as much as it is Adam tells a story of someone doing the same thing years ago. Unless the target audience​ is galen fans.

The irony is that Galen was a huge proponent of dissection, advising his students to visit Alexandria where the human skeleton could still be studied. He was also in favor of first-hand observation and would have frowned upon the practices of those professors.

TheOdd1sOut: BOY WERE THEY WRONG

Galen's big accomplishment was supporting the brain over the heart as the seat of consciousness. Impressive enough for the time.

Well, there ARE 2 bones in the lower jaw, they just fuse together. The line between them can be seen in baby skulls.

Galen was Roman and also Vesalius debunked over 300 of Galen’s ideas. Otherwise great factual evidence

2 + 2= Galen

2:18 when a teen girl finds out her favorite guy in a boy band has a girlfriend or something

Makes you think on how far behind we are than what we should be. All because of liars.

As someone who studied medicine through time, it is nice to see that people recognise how wrong we were for a lot of medical history.

Fail'n Galen. I guess we shouldn't be too hard on the old chap though, considering what he had to work with. Most of the blame should fall on the naturalists that considered his work, conclusions and subsequent teachings, a dogma of sorts. If something can't be questioned, it's not science, it's faith. Faith demands acceptance, while teaching nothing. Science, on the other hand, demands that something be shown to be true, before it can be accepted. It's a hard lesson that, unfortunately, humans seem to be doomed to repeat, time and time again.

After dissecting numerous humans I took conclude that Galen was very wrong.

1:46 For the record, there are 4 lobes of the liver, not 2...or 5 for that matter. The left, right, caudate and quadrate lobes. So neither of them got that right.

Wtf is up with the ear rape outro!!!

Poor him, i could feel his sadness😭

Because we’re afraid of looking at a naked dead person and being blamed for having a fetish

Actually although the European world had an incredibly distorted and inaccurate other parts of the world had already known accurate and proper anatomy such as the early Islamic world such as the ottomans and others

The video doesn’t actually describe why Galen was accepted by many. Christianity had a great monopoly over medicine due to threats of excommunication. Galen believed in design theory and so was preached by the church because of it. Some ,before Versailles, were arrested or killed for questioning Galen. Questioning Galen was questioning the church. Questioning the church was questioning God

Jesus, that reaction at the end... I almost thought Adam was going to give us BOTH a heart attack!

Thank you, Adam, for ruining everything! It's really educating/informative! Keep up the good work!

As a student medievalist, I had a lecture about this a month ago and what this video shows is almost not parodic! Of course, they didn't only study Galien but Avicenne and Hippocrate too - and Avicenne was actually even more popular than Galien! A typical medical school day in late Middle Age/early Renaissance was like this: Morning: 1st year - Avicenne and then Galien 2nd year - Galien and then Galien (yeah, that's about 4 hours of Galien) 3rd year - Hippocrate and then Galien 4th year - Avicenne and then Avicenne Afternoon: 1st year - Avicenne (only 1 lecture for them) 2nd year - Avicenne *2 3rd year - Galien *2 4th year - Hippocrate *2 So students mostly spent their time listening to the teacher's commentaries on Avicenne and Galien's books. One of the advantages of Avicenne was that it was not too big nor too small for Middle Age/Renaissance's standards, it was considered as both easy to memorize and interesting for the students, and students, when they actually became teachers, would teach Avicenne/Galien too so it kept going for 200 years. Also, medical student did watch dissections with actual commentaries about what was happening and not only Galien's texts read in the background... but rarely on humans, it was more vivisections of animals, tests like "what happens if you cut that nerve", etc. That's all folks! Sorry for my bad English, if you want to know more about this subject, I strongly recommend you to read Joël Chandelier's books on the matter, especially if you read a bit of French (but I think some of them were translated in English, just check out the library of your own university) > www2.univ-paris8.fr/histoire/?page_id=1602

*those sound effects...*

The worshipping of one figure as an ultimate medical authority is the opposite of what science is supposed to be about.

Dafuq I expected sth like that to last for a maximum of a few hundred years, but over 1000!?

I had actually covered this during my history classes actually we covered alot of medicine throughout time and one of Galen's theories was essentially a reserved version of one of Hippocrates in the four humours which was essentially a guide on what to do with certain symptoms

1st guy who did human anatomy was ibn sina an arab doctor who was born in Iraq and was a college professor in spain later on in the years 700s

This is even more funny if you speak swedish where Galen means insane

I love how Adam's voice rises for the last three words; A THOUSAND YEARS!! He just sounds so upset with our species.

I Think Acient People Are Quite Idiot Because Other Animals And Humans Are Different

This new format is really cool! I really love your show Adam! You make history so much more fun for me.

The thing they left out of this clip at least is that Galen wasn't just Greek, he was a subject of the Roman Empire in which it was illegal to dissect human cadavers. I might've gotten that part about the illegality of it wrong, but Ted Ed has a video on the guy, just watch that.

There are a few different stories very much like this in the history of academe. Man, humanity is embarrassing sometimes.

Galen is Swedish for crazy

But Adam if this had been discredited why do a segment on it

So They just taught what was in the books and not by experience WOW THAT SOUNDS FAMILIAR, DOESN'T IT AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

It really feels like they went for a German accent for Vesalius whereas he was Flemish...like seriously a Dutch/Flemish person sounds nothing like that in English...I get that getting someone to do a Dutch accent might be harder, but just go for no specific foreign accent at all in that case, please...

Hi my name is Galen but it is pronounced differently

The liver has 4 lobes, not 2 as mentioned

And even the word "anatomy" comes to us through misspelling. It was originally "atomy" which meant "a skeleton". But before we had prevalent dictionaries, people often spelled things however it sounded to them, and various writers and experts would disagree. People hearing "an atomy" kept mistakenly writing it as "anatomy", and it stuck.

People are about dumb as hell bro 😒😴😴 Like Ronald Reagan once said "trust but verify"

1000 years... think of how many lives were probably lost because doctors didn't know proper anatomy

Whew, I'm glad we have learned from this. Luckily, we don't use animals such as mice to figure if medicine will work on humans. Oh wait...

HOW DID NOBODY NOTICE THIS!? How did Galen himself record these things wrong? Was he just guessing? Could he not count? Why would you listen to a dude who never dissected anyone, and why would he write a guide to an anatomy he doesn't know? Makes you wonder what we're wrong about today. Is gravity real? Is the mitochondria REALLY the powerhouse of the cell? Or are we all just kind of idiots?

THIS MUST BE WHY TEACHERS TAUGHT ME THAT THE HEART IS ON THE LEFT SIDE OF YOUR CHEST AND NOT IN THE CENTER & THAT THAT'S THE REASON FOLKS PUT THEIR RIGHT HAND OVER THAT SIDE OF THE CHEST WHEN SALUTING THE FLAG!!! 😠

Seeing some comments, I think people might be missing the mark on this video. Yes, Galen was limited at the time since operations on human cadavers was forbidden, but we're not calling him out for that. The point is, it took 1000 years for anybody to even consider trying to check his work and just assumed he was right, 1000 years worth of scientists not doing the #1 thing scientists should do, checking works to confirm an idea/theory.

When you look at it, many scientists of old and today can be as close minded as many priests in the matter of defending what they BELIEVE is right.

Imagine if this went onwards to this day be more like 10,000 or even 1,000,000 years. Even so 1,000 years of teaching unofficial parts of the body, that is just f***ing nuts!!!

This is insanity!

Ibn Al-Nafis actually discredited some of Galen's work hundreds of years before Vesalius did. Much of the Muslim world had updated their anatomy teachings.

“Galen says that there’s five lobes on the liver, but I only see two!” Galen was actually closer to the actual amount, there’s 4 lobes in the liver. The human liver is most commonly divided into left and right lobes based on the location of the falciform ligament. It can also be divided into 4 lobes when viewed from the bottom, but this isn't very common. Finally, the liver can be divided into 8 segments, as defined by the hepatic veins.

So basically mocking a Greek Physician who did the best he could, and made many advances in medical science... Simply because far better Physicians came along, and because Human disection was outlawed.... Anyone else see a problem here....

We need more Impractical Jokers!

GOOD LORD LEVEL OUT YOUR AUDIO!! Sound Design 101 here truTV. 2:42 RIP headphone users

This is the reason why I despise the entire school system as it is, they teach it as wrote and don’t allow students to do their own research, question or argue ‘established facts’. Well I did anyway. I refused to bow down and worship the altar of Shakespeare. We did a course on Shakespeare and I kid you not on the first day I outright asked the teacher if I could do all the coursework and essays listing what is bad, wrong or not genius about it and he said ‘no’ of course. Why are most people okay with schools forcing one opinion on ANYTHING. Why do schools all teach that Shakespeare was a genius and don’t even allow for discourse or discussion about why he just maybe was only okay and even bad a t times and how many modern authors are better, and that art (including writing) is subjective and people can have different tastes and opinions and they are all legitimate. So I skipped the course due to ‘religious reasons’ as I deeply strongly and truly BELIEVE that it’s WRONG that school is all indoctrination, follow the herd, obey authority and memorize then vomit information for tests; oh then promptly forget everything you just ‘learned’. That is wrong and it’s not learning. You need to actually retain and be able to use information for it to be learning. Anyone that innovates, invents, advances art, science and humanity does NOT mindlessly obey established ‘facts’ and tradition. I am no zombie sheep. I could go on and have many stories, I plan on sharing them on my RU-vid channel later still trying to get my first video to upload....... it keeps taking forever and not working even after like 2 days! *sigh* good video by the way.

This isn’t a suprise to us because we were taught this.

First 💀

Well, this clip doesn't mention that the Catholic Church is the reason western medicine hadn't changed as they decreed that contradicting Galen's teaching was Heresy. So Vesalius was basically cast out for doing this. Not to mention the fact that it was also wrong to dissect a body. Very rarely was a Human body actually dissected in medical teaching as it was also frowned upon by the church.

We shouldn't respect galen? *I respect the man behind the 1000 year biology bamboozle*

Science is about questioning, hypothesising, and understanding the world around us. This is what happens when you don't question, you turn into a preteen fangirl who learned her favorite band is breaking up.

Galen might be wrong, but if people believe him for 1,000 year without questioning him it's hardly only his fault.

This is why I hate this show. It is technically true but presents information in a trivial sense as to deface the person or group that was previous or currently wrong. However, its usually a lot more nuanced than that. The presentation makes Galen look like an idiot who set medical advancements back hundreds of years with false writings when a simple google search would tell you he did incredible things considering the limitations of the times.

It's pretty funny that "Galen" in Swedish is literally translated to "Crazy". Coincidence? I think not!

Galen studied corpses that washed up on on river beds. He was studying necrotic tissue. It was higly illegal to study cadavers back then.

A thousand years and no one thought "You know that guy rotting in jail?...Let's cut him up for science."

Adam Ruins Everything has always been crap, but making fun of ancient people for not knowing things that we know now? Lame.

So I study veterinary medicine and I am qutie familiar with the anatomy of a dog and how did he come to the conclusion that major blood vessels start at the liver? The most importent ones are very close to it but the just run by 😂

Why would you not talk about paracelsus as well? He was instrumental in the shift towards the physicians and barber surgeons becoming one and the same. And he also had one hell of a backstory

really goes to show that just bc something is believed by the masses for a long time, doesn't make it true. *cough* Christianity *cough*

Funny story - Galen wrote at least 1 page every day of his life - and his medical findings did get more accurate over time. But since he produced soooooo many pages, other people printed summaries of his work & the often left out the more important findings he made toward the end of his life

It was taught wrong for 1000 years because it wasn't at all practical or savory until we invented sterile surgeries.

god i hate galen but don't dis the guy too much. he still disproved a bunch of even more wrong stuff regarding anatomy that came before him

I imagine if Galen had actually autopsied a human’s remains then the priest of Hades would have tried to kill him

Galen probably made a lot of mistakes. “5 chambers in the liver” he probably sliced a liver by accident with the scalpel when he was trying to remove it from the body 🤣

It takes bunch of misfits to make us realize that our point of view is totally illogical. Be those misfits.

funny fact galen in swedish means mad/crazy.. sounds about right

Now I kind of wish the show was Galen's Anatomy instead of Grey's and it was all incorrect science

What did physicians do for a living when they haven’t dissected even a human body?

Don't know why he didn't try it out on a real corpse, I mean, there were plenty around at the time.

2:20 Me when I found out that JP had a lot of dinos wrong.

Fun fact. Galen is actually the swedish word for crazy.

A little fun thing is that in swedish galen means crazy, so its Funny that he was wrong