Schofield memorial lecture. Bull semen and muscle ATP: some evidence of the dawn of medical science in ancient Egypt.

The importance of animal experimentation to human and animal health is not well understood by an increasingly articulate segment of the public. This could have very unfortunate consequences for man and his domestic animals. Even veterinarians and physicians are not as conversant as they need be about the great extent to which advances in human health have depended upon animal observations and experiments. Some believe that resort to "animal models" of biomedical phenomena, including diseases--a comparative or analogical approach to medical studies--is a relatively recent event. Even medical historians often treat these subjects as occasionally recurring aberrations which began with the Greeks, thus largely overlooking the historical meaning and continuing importance of "one medicine" irrespective of species. In fact, comparative medicine has probably been basic to medical progress ever since the dawn of a medical science. Recent research indicates that this approach to biomedical mysteries began to evolve in the minds of Egypt's healer-priests long before Aristotle and the later Alexandrian Greeks made the whole process explicit. Here we examine the origins of what were possibly the first two biomedical theories profounded from inferences based upon dissections, confirmed in at least one instance by experiment, and then applied to medical practice.