Galen

Courtesy: National Library of Medicine.

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

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

Galen had no deficiency of hubris. He boasted that his voluminous writings contained all one needed ever to know about medicine. His reputation as the final word in medicine 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.” That produced something of a set-back in the development of Western rational medicine.

The classicist and Greek-to-English translator of many of Galen’s writings, Peter 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, a provincial city, extant in present day Turkey. Pergamon had existed before the time of Alexander the Great, and became a center of culture. It had a famous library containing some 200,000 books. Galen’s father, a wealthy architect, steered his son into a career in medicine following a ‘Hippocratic’ dream so advising him. He sent Galen to the Hippocratic school in Pergamon, a part of the Roman Empire. Galen’s interests, attested to in his own writings, included mathematics and philosophy, which he maintained and incorporated in his work throughout his career, as well as the writings of the Hippocratic physicians and of the history of medicine from before and after Hippocrates. Afterwards, in 152 CE, in his early 20s, Galen 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, and bones. Glimpsing the various parts of the interior of the body, he began to wonder how they worked and how they worked together — musing about function, or physiology.