The early stages of anatomy were not riddled with great research.  Back at the start of researching, we couldn’t perform many safe researching procedures on humans, so we relied on different mediums to study.  Grey’s Anatomy was actually almost fully written and illustrated with the use of dead soldiers.  Many used rats, and other animals.  Without the use of MRI machines, and X-Rays, we relied on our dissection.

Dissection was the primary form of studying anatomy before we had tools that allowed us to study the living human body.  We would perform autopsies on the dead, and other dead animals.  This has been a very controversial form of study, regardless, it has brought us an amazing amount of knowledge of the human body.  The fact that we could not perform test on the living, we had many false understandings.  This lead to many false assumptions like the ‘fact’ that blood was stationary.  Although, through this method brought us almost all of our basic understandings of anatomy.

Orlans, F. (1998). The human use of animals case studies in ethical choice. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gray, H. (1918, April 6). Anatomy of the Human Body. Retrieved September 8, 2014, from https://web.archive.org/web/20070316005206/http://www.bartleby.com/107/1.html