Galen of Pergamon

What the film says

• Rejected the vapour theory and demonstrated, by tying the ureters of a living animal, that the kidneys supply the bladder.

  Watch 12:22 in the film III. The Oath and the Ligature

• Showed that urine does not pass back from the bladder, and used one tied and one free ureter as a control.

  Watch 13:21 in the film III. The Oath and the Ligature

• Held that the kidney draws the watery part of the blood as a lodestone draws iron, and rejected the sieve; the view stood for some fifteen hundred years.

  Watch 14:08 in the film III. The Oath and the Ligature

• 'Galen's question', how the kidney makes urine, frames the nineteenth-century quarrel between secretion and filtration.

  Watch 23:21 in the film V. What the Water Knew

On the timeline

• 2nd century AD: Galen ties the ureters of a living animal and shows that the kidneys supply the bladder. timeline
• 1916: A. J. Brock's Loeb translation of Galen's On the Natural Faculties appears. timeline

Sources