Abstract
Man's interest in his own digestive processes goes back many centuries. | The views on digestion held by all the ancient peoples and tribes were full of magic, mysticism and superstition. Either demons or different humors existed in the body to direct the natural digestive processes. | The ideas of the ancients were not essentially different from those of the Greeks, whose philosophy exercised so profound an influence upon their medicine, or from the ideas of the Romans. | Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, taught that gastric digestion was brought about by a sort of internal cooking or coction, possibly through the agency of the "innate heat11 of the body, derived from the blood,one of the four cardinal fluids. | And this was the belief subscribed to by scientists for the next one thousand years. Scientific thought had been tremendously influenced by the philosophy of Plato, in which reflection and contemplation were uppermost. Observations by the senses, ideas born as a result of observations, experiments to verify these ideas, the study of facts - these were disregarded. Men began to deduce underlying physiological principles and to explain vital phenomena by mental speculations only. This method was to retard the advance of our knowledge of physiology until men learned to think scientifically and to fully appreciate the scientific method.