Galen

After Hippocrates, the honor of the history of Western rational medicine’s most illustrious figure goes to Galen, born in Asia Minor in 130 CE, almost 600 years after the birth of Hippocrates. He, like Hippocrates, whom he considered his intellectual heir, took as fundamental the idea that understanding disease required understanding the workings of the human body. He experimented, vivisected animals, and gave popular public lectures and demonstrations.

Galen advanced our knowledge of the formation and excretion of urine, of speech and respiration, and of the action of nerves and muscles, and left 22 volumes of work.

Galen had no shortcomings in the area of hubris. He boasted that his voluminous writings contained all one needed ever to know about medicine. His reputation carried the day for the next 1400 years or so, to such an extent as to stifle further advances in the discovery of anatomy, physiology and the pathogenesis of disease during that period. His ideas influenced medical thinking even until the 20th century. “At least until the 16th and 17th centuries, to know medicine was to know it as Galen wrote about it in the 2nd century.” Something of a set-back in the history of Western rational medicine. But Singer cautions us against blaming Galen as if he was “….endowed with the capacity posthumously to bully his posterity, for the uncritical attitude towards him of his successors.”

Galen’s reputation during his lifetime spread throughout the Roman Empire. He eventually became the personal physician of the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius (b. 121 CE, d. 180 CE; r. 161-180 CE).

The early Galen

Galen entered the world in Pergamon, an extant town in present day Turkey. Pergamon had existed before the time of Alexander the Great, becoming a center of culture with a famous library containing some 200,000 books. Galen’s father, a wealthy architect, steered his son into a career in medicine as the result of a ‘Hippocratic’ dream, sending him to the Hippocratic school in Pergamon, a part of the Roman Empire. Afterwards, in 152 CE, he continued to study medicine in Alexandria, returning six years later, to become surgeon to the gladiators in the amphitheater at Pergamon. There he treated gladiators with all kinds of open wounds, of the head, chest, abdomen, muscles. He began to wonder how the various parts of the body he could glimpse worked and worked together.