El The long journey of medical embryology

From prescientific and predisciplinary to scientific and transdisciplinary

Abstract

This paper makes a historical review of Embryology from Antiquity to the Present through dividing it into two stages: one, perceived as speculative - descriptive prescientific (pre-disciplinary) and other, microscopic – explanatory - scientific (disciplinary and interdisciplinary). Both of them allow diachronically figuring out how it was approached, changed and tried to explain the formation, growth, development and maturation of living beings, with special focus in its medical features, during hundreds of years. In this regard, with the dispute between preformism and epigenetism as background, it highlights its evolution from an observational beginning to these days when morpho, cyto, histo and chemogenetic (molecular) aspects are integrated among them and with other fields of science. Such an extensive and singular journey
makes possible to understand why this discipline has not only become part of another more comprehensive one: Development Biology, but it can also be glimpsed as transdisciplinary towards the future.