Carla Mooney - Inside the Human Body (Inquire & Investigate)

Around 500 BCE: Ancient Greek philosopher and medical theorist Alcmaeon of Crotron makes the first recorded medical dissection of a human body.

Around 400 BCE: Greek physician Hippocrates supports the theory that the body is made of four humors or bodily fluids: black bile, phlegm, blood, and yellow bile. When the humors are out of balance, a person becomes ill.

384322 BCE: The philosopher Aristotle distinguishes between arteries and veins. He relies on the dissection of animals instead of human bodies for his work.

129216 CE: Greek scientist and physician Galen moves to ancient Rome. He demonstrates that the arteries hold blood, but mistakenly believes that the blood flows back and forth from the heart in an ebb-and-flow manner. His work forms the basis of medical knowledge for centuries.

1235: The first European medical school opens at Salerno, Italy.

1490: The first anatomical theater, where students view dissections and witness human anatomy, opens in Padua, Italy.

1491: The first illustrated printed medical book, Fasciculus Medicinae by Johannes de Ketham, is published in Venice, Italy.

14521519: Italian painter and inventor Leonardo da Vinci creates more than 700 detailed illustrations of the human body.

1543: Flemish physician Vesalius prints his seven-volume illustrated anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Workings of the Human Body), which features detailed and accurate drawings of the dissected human body.

1628: English physician William Harvey correctly describes in detail the circulation and properties of blood through body and heart.

1664: Thomas Willis gives the first complete description of the anatomy of the brain.

1774: English obstetrician William Hunter publishes a detailed work on the reproductive system.

1832: England passes the Anatomy Act to provide a legitimate supply of bodies and prevent body-snatching, grave-robbing, and murdering as a means of providing human bodies for dissection and study.

1839: Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann introduce cell theory, the idea that the body is made up of tiny individual cells and that the cell is the basic unit of all life.

1858: English physician Henry Gray first publishes Grays Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical, a textbook of human anatomy. The latest version is still widely used today.

1895: German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen discovers X-rays, which become important in medical diagnosis and therapy.

1910: August Krogh wins the Nobel Prize for discovering how the capillaries regulate blood flow.

1952: Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell receive the Nobel Prize in physics for their work on magnetic resonance, which leads to the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a way to scan and look inside the body.

1953: James Watson and Francis Crick discover the molecular structure of DNA.

1977: Raymond Damadian builds the first magnetic resonance (MRI) body scanner and performs a full body scan.

1990: Scientists develop functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain as it works.

2003: The Human Genome Project completes mapping the entire sequence of DNA in human chromosomes.

2018: Doctors begin to have success treating cancer with immunotherapy, which supports the bodys immune system in defeating cancer cells.