History of Bio-mechanics

               History of Bio-mechanics

Socrates (469 BC – 399 BC) Born 2400 years ago, taught that we could not begin to understand the world around us until we understood our own nature. As scientists who seek knowledge of the mechanics within their own bodies, and those of other living creatures, we share something of Socrates’ inward inquiry. Fortunately, we do not share the public abuse that he suffered, and which led him, as an old man of 70, to be tried, convicted, and executed for “impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens.”

Plato (424 BC – 348 BC) The execution of Socrates had a profound affect on Plato, 51 years his junior and a member of the Athenian aristocracy. He began the philosophical inquiries that set forth most of the important problems and concepts of Western philosophy, psychology, and logic, as well as politics. Plato postulated a realm of ideas that existed independently of the sensory world, and considered observations and experiments worthless. However, he also believed that mathematics, a system of pure ideas, was the best tool for the pursuit of knowledge. His conceptualization of mathematics as the life force of science created the necessary womb for the birth and growth of mechanics.

Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) At age 17, Aristotle, the son of a physician in northern Greece, went to Athens to study at Plato’s academy. Aristotle had a remarkable talent for observation and was fascinated by anatomy and structure of living things. Indeed, Aristotle might be considered the first biomechanician. He wrote the first book called “De Motu Animalium” – On the Movement of Animals. He not only saw animals’ bodies as mechanical systems, but pursued such questions as the physiological difference between imagining performing an action and actually doing it. Aristotle eventually departed from Plato’s philosophy so far as to advocate qualitative, common sense science, purged of mathematics. However, his advocacy of syllogistic logic, the drawing of conclusions from assumed postulates, gave us the deductive method of modern science. Thus, in the span of a century ending 2300 years ago, three men identified our most fundamental scientific tools: deductive reasoning and mathematical reasoning. And in addition, biomechanics was born!

Galen (AD 129 – 200) With the fall of Greece and the rise of the Roman Empire, natural philosophy waned in favor of technology. The second century anatomist, Galen, physician to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, comes and goes, leaving his monumental work, On the Function of the Parts (meaning the parts of the human body) as the world’s standard medical text for the next 1,400 years. He used number to describe muscles. His essay De Motu Musculorum (On the Movements of Muscles) distinguished between motor and sensory nerves, agonist and antagonist muscles, described tonus, and introduced terms such as diarthrosis and synarthrosis. He taught that muscular contraction resulted from the passage of “animal spirits” from the brain through the nerves to the muscles. Snook (1978) suggested that some writers consider his treatise the first textbook on kinesiology, and he has been termed “the father of sports medicine.” Due to his era’s discouragement of human dissection, the majority of Galen’s work was based on the dissections of dogs, pigs, and apes. Nothing like another biomechanician is seen for a long, long time.