Galen of Pergamum

Galen, of Pergamum (Gălēnos, of Pergamum), (AD 129–99), Greek physician, whose outstanding influence on medicine in ancient and modern times has not been equalled. As a young man he studied and travelled widely, but he spent most of his life at Rome as physician to the emperor Marcus Aurelius, his son Commodus, and Septimius Severus. He was the most learned scientist of his day, satisfying the popular taste of the time with anatomical displays, lectures, and handbooks on medical topics. He was a voluminous writer; almost all his extant works are medical and cover every branch of health and disease, especially physiology and anatomy, but he believed that there was a close connection between medicine and philosophy and wrote a number of commentaries on works of Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus as well as on general philosophical and philological topics. He wrote in elegant if somewhat prolix Greek, and was in many ways typical of the cultural life of his time (see SOPHISTIC, SECOND and ATHENAEUS). In his day the medical profession was divided into several mutually antagonistic sects, but Galen was eclectic; he professed allegiance to none and preferred to take from each what seemed to him to be true. After his death his influence caused the various sects to die out. He was a profound admirer of Hippocrates whose doctrines he professed to be merely reinforcing and augmenting. Much of his physiology was traditional, but his discourses on anatomy and physiological processes reveal his close observation which brought to light many new facts. He followed Herophilus in maintaining that the arteries contained blood, not air. It appears that he seldom, perhaps never, dissected human bodies, for which opportunities were rare, but used animals of various kinds, preferably apes.

Galen's writings formed the basis of all later medical works. After the ninth century, and the translation of his works into Arabic, he became the standard of medical perfection. His fame in Europe in the Middle Ages probably derived from the influence of the Arabic medical writers, and his opinions and his name were universally invoked even when his writings were little read.