The Medical College - Page 26
The third librarian, Aristophanes of Byzantium,
com-
missioned 70 scholars to translate the Bible
into Greek;
and this translation, used by Jesus Christ,
became
known as the Septuagint. (There is other
evidence to
suggest that the "flight into Egypt" took place
in
Alexandria.) The fourth librarian was
Aristarchus of
Samosthrace, who developed the eight parts of
speech
and wrote commentaries on the works of Homer,
Pin-
dar, and Aristophanes of Athens.
Returning to the faculty, we should not fail
to
aknowledge what we owe to Euclid beyond
geometry.
Euclid, who was commissioned to start a school
of
mathematics around 300 B.C., established a mode
of
accumulating understanding by starting with a
few
axioms and theories, stacking conclusions into
work-
able structures of knowledge. Examples today
would
be the Periodic Chart of Elements, the
Myers-Briggs
Personality Types, and the concept of
management
schools, to name a few structures or
inferential models
in different disciplines.
Apollonius and Archimedes were in the next
genera-
tion of scholars. Whereas Apollonius gave us
the conic
sections, Archimedes gave us number systems
(myriads)
capable of counting the sands of the earth.
That same
generation included Aristarchus of Samos, who
taught
that the earth moved around the sun and whose
name
appeared in the margin of a book used by
Copernicus
while studying at Bologna in the seventeenth
century.
During the following century, Hipparchus of
Nicea
calculated the length of the year to within
minutes and
the length of the month to a few seconds.
Around 150
A
.D. Claudius Ptolemy wrote 13 books on astronomy,
called the Almagest. This set also explained
that find-
ing a descriptive model for understanding was
more
important than accounting for every fact or
observa-
tion. In his books on astrology, he summarized
the
beliefs of the Greeks, Egyptians, and Persians
and gave
us the horoscopes and Zodiac signs used today.
Also
around 150 A.D. Galen came to Alexandria to
study. He
was the authority on medicine for more than a
thou-
sand years; when physicians found parts of the
body to
differ from his descriptions, they concluded
that the
person was abnormal.
During the early days of Alexandria, prisoners
were
dissected alive. However, evil was not limited
to
"pagans" but discrimination and killing
occurred
between Jews and Greeks, Christians and
Egyptians,
and so on. Around 400 A.D., a Christian mob
under
Cyril ripped the flesh off the mathematician
Hypatia
because her beliefs were not like
theirs.
Whereas understanding could be accumulated
in
libraries and transmitted by books from
generation to
generation, wisdom (seeing the importance of
doing
good for others, i.e., human truths) has to be
reinspired
again and again by individuals in each
generation.
Through the centuries, religion and classical
human-
ism have contended to underwrite the meaning of
wis-
dom. Sometimes, religion (morality) provided
the
rationale for justice, at other times, humanism
(ethics).
Whatever, the lesson from Alexandria's past is
that
whenever a true sense of the underlying
principles of
morality or ethics was not present, minorities
and indi-
viduals suffered. Thus, during periods of
ebbing or plu-
ralistic religious beliefs (like today), ethics
becomes
necessary to form a behavorial consensus, to
"hold
these truths." Accordingly, the university's
first mission
is not to acquire new understandings nor to
teach many
students, but to reinspire wisdom at an
effective level
in each new generation.
16.
Which statement best summarizes the attitude
at
the ancient library-museum at
Alexandria?
A.
It was bascially a teacher-training
school.
B.
It was an academy of philosophers.
C.
It was a natural history museum.
D.
It was mostly a scholarly research
institute.
17.
Plato's sense of "truth" was:
A.
what was revealed by God.
B.
limited to mathematical proofs.
C.
underlying principles in any
field.
D.
what was agreed to by consensus.
18.
Eratosthenes was able to measure the angle
of
the sun at two distant places on the earth's
sur-
face simultaneously by:
A.
measuring at one place at midday on
mid-
summer's day a year after measuring at
the
other place at the same time and
date.
B.
having two teams measure angles at
the
same time and date.
C.
calculating the transit of the sun
between
measurements.
D.
calculating the movement (turning) of
the
earth between measurements.
19.
One argument given that the "flight into
Egypt"
of Jesus Christ took place in Alexandria
was:
A.
Jesus Christ spoke Greek.
B.
Jesus Christ knew the Greek version of
the
Bible.
C.
Jesus Christ used the accentuation
and
punctuation of Alexandria.
D.
Jesus Christ was against
plagiarism.
Adapted from Dr. James McGovern, "Alexandria:
The First Research
University," MCV/VCU, 1990.
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