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Today's lecture will include the most outstanding achievements in biology as it relates to the medical sciences.
Early in Greek history, Hippocrates began to study the human body and to apply scientific method to the problems of diagnosis and the treatment of diseases. Unlike other physicians of his time, he discarded the theory that disease was caused by the gods. Instead, he kept careful records of symptoms and treatments, indicating the success or failure of the patient's cure. He has been recognized as the father of modern medicine.
About a century later, Aristotle began a scientific study of plants and animals, classifying more than five hundred types on the basis of body structure. Because of his great contribution to the field, Aristotle has been called the father of biology.
By the first century, A.D., Dioscorides had collected a vast amount of information on plants, which he recorded in the now famous Materia Medica, a book that remained an authoritative reference among physicians for fifteen hundred years.
During the Middle Ages, scientific method was scorned in favor of alchemy. Thus, medicine and biology had advanced very little from the time of the ancients until the 17th century when the English physician and anatomist William Harvey discovered a mechanism for the circulation of blood in the body.