It is impossible to understand modern clinical research without knowing where it began.
Even the way we screen volunteers, document symptoms and follow strict protocols at Probandeninfo comes from methods shaped over generations of medical practice. This article begins our series on the development of scientific medicine, from its origins to the foundations of modern clinical research.
Observing the body: Hippocrates and Galen
Hippocrates of ancient Greece (460–370 BC), often called the “father of medicine”, argued that illness has natural, not magical, causes and that doctors should watch, describe and compare what they see. Patterns in symptoms, lifestyle and environment formed the basis of early diagnosis. This systematic observation still underlies every screening visit at Probandeninfo, where we begin by listening, asking questions and carefully documenting what participants tell us.
Centuries later Galen of Pergamon (129–216 AD) expanded this approach in the Roman Empire. He opened the bodies of animals (apes, pigs, goats) to study how they were built inside, a process known as dissection, and assumed these findings applied to the human body. His extensive writings blended Greek knowledge with experiment.
His model of the four humors (four body fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) was inaccurate, but it created a logical, testable framework for thinking about health — linking symptoms to underlying causes. For over 1,500 years, European doctors learned mainly through the ideas of Hippocrates and Galen.
The Middle Ages: universities and medical schools
After the fall of Rome, much medical knowledge survived in monasteries. In the High Middle Ages (11th–13th century), this knowledge entered the first European universities, including centres in Salerno, Paris and Bologna, where scholars translated Greek and Arabic works and taught anatomy, physiology and therapy.
By the 13th century, medical faculties (formal university departments) trained students through books and bedside practice, and illness was increasingly explained by natural causes. In the German-speaking regions, newly founded universities adopted and expanded these same academic traditions starting in the 14th century, bringing formal medical education to Central Europe and laying the structural groundwork for the influential German research clinics of the future.
This academic culture of fixed curricula, exams and public debate laid the groundwork for later scientific standards and procedures. It helped shape the structured, well-documented approach that modern clinical studies rely on today.
Early anatomy and the first human dissections
For centuries, doctors relied mainly on books. Human dissection was rare until 1315, when Mondino de’ Liuzzi at the University of Bologna performed one of the first public, church-approved dissections in Western Europe in a thousand years.
He dissected the body of an executed criminal before students and colleagues. His textbook Anathomia showed something new: it reintroduced the practice of examining the body directly rather than relying solely on ancient texts. While Mondino still worked within the traditional framework, his approach paved the way for later scientists to check theory against what they actually observed.
German-speaking universities that developed the Bologna and Paris models later became central to medical science. Their emphasis on observation and academic structure shaped the safer, more controlled research we conduct today.
What comes next
This was Part 1 of our series on how scientific medicine evolved. Next time, we look at the scientific revolution, the rise of the laboratory and the first rules for proving that a treatment works. If you want to see how these ideas shape modern research, you can explore our current studies and register your interest. Participation is always voluntary and based on informed consent.
Click here to learn more about ongoing studies at Probandeninfo.
