Both works provide authoritative information on the authenticity of his writings and are major sources of biographical detail. From to his death in , Galen continued his medical research and writings, producing such major works as The Method of Cure. His last work was titled Introduction to Dialectics. That Galen was a man of his time is shown by his success and rapid preferment, by his acceptance of dreams as sound directives for action and treatment, and by his acceptance of the Hippocratic tradition and of the social role of public prognostics.
That he provoked such strong reactions shows him to have been a dominant individual in an age of individuals. Galen believed the Hippocratic writings were never wrong—merely obscure—and he saw his own work as the extension and clarification of the Hippocratic corpus; for example, he systematized the theory of the four humors.
Nevertheless, Galen was aware of the intervening intellectual progress, saying "the fact that we are born later than the ancients and receive from them the arts in an advanced state, is no small advantage … things that took Hippocrates a long time to discover one can now learn in a few years and one can employ the rest of one's life in the discovery of the things that remain to be learned.
The change in medical thought that Galen produced in his own lifetime was much greater than the changes from Hippocrates's time to his own. When Galen commenced his studies, there were as many "medicines" as there were sects and no criteria for judging "the best sect.
Galen saw the science of medicine as "based on two criteria, reason and experience," which guaranteed the truth or falsity of its propositions. His systematic anatomical experiments provided a means of demonstrating to the senses those things which no sane man could deny any more than he could deny the self-evident axioms of mathematics. Galen's concept of Nature is subtle and complex, and his Creator differs from the Christian God in not being omnipotent but subject to both the laws of necessity and the nature of matter.
It was the very success of his program of unification of medical theory that led to its "rigidity" and supremacy in the ensuing centuries. Most surprisingly, we do not know Galen's family name, because, not wanting to trade on his forebears' reputations, he used only his given name; the name Claudius often associated with him is probably a Renaissance misunderstanding.
Galen said of himself, "I have worked only for science and truth and for that reason I have avoided placing my name at the beginning of my books. The translation by M. Perhaps while still in his teens, Galen became a therapeutes or 'attendant' of the healing god Asclepius, whose sanctuary was an important cultural center not only for Pergamum, but also for the entire Roman province of Asia.
The prestigious cult association of therapeutai included magistrates, senators, highly-placed members of the imperial civil service, and literary men from all over the province. Nicon had planned for his son to study philosophy or politics, the traditional pursuits of the cultured governing class into which he had been born.
But in or Asclepius intervened. In a dream, Galen says, the god told Nicon to allow his son to study medicine, and for the next four years Galen studied with the distinguished physicians who gathered at the sanctuary of Asclepius. In or Nicon died, and Galen at 19 found himself rich and independent. He chose to travel and further his medical education at Smyrna modern Izmir , Corinth, and Alexandria. In he returned to his native city and a prestigious appointment: physician to the gladiators.
From autumn to autumn he gained valuable practical experience in trauma and sports medicine, and he continued to pursue his studies in theoretical medicine and philosophy.
He left, returning only for a three-year span from until some time in The rest of his career was spent in Rome. Paris: Les Belle Lettres, Galen on Antecedent Causes.
Edited and translated with introduction and commentary by R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Galen on Bloodletting. Translated by Peter Brain. Galen on Food and Diet. Translated and notes by Mark Grant. London: Routledge, Translated with commentary by John Spangler Kieffer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, Galen on Language and Ambiguity De captionibus.
Translated with commentary by Robert Blair Edlow. Leiden: Brill, Galen on the Natural Faculties. Translated by Arthur John Brock. London: Heineiman, Ltd. Loeb series. Translated with commentary by Margaret Tallmadge May. Edited and translated by R. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Selected Secondary Sources Barnes, Jonathan. Sharples, ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Boylan, Michael.
Boudon-Millot, ed, fr. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, Paris: Beauchesne, Connell, Sophia. Cosans, Christopher E. Crombie, A. Augustine to Galileo. London: Heinemann, DeLacy, Philip. Durling, Richard. A Dictionary of Medical Terms. Edelstein, Ludwig. Ancient Medicine. Farrington, B. Greek Science: Theophrastus to Galen. Baltimore, MD: Penguin, Fischer, Klaus-Dietrich ed. Frede, Michael. Freudiger, Jurg. Gill, Christopher. Tomas Calvo ed. Sankt Augustin: Academia: Hankinson, R.
Martha Nussbaum, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Galen. Steven Rezinck. NY: Basic Books, Kember, O. Kidd, I. Long, ed. London: Athlone, Kollesch, Jutta. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, Kollesch, Jutta and Diethard Nickel, eds. He studied in Greece, in Alexandria and other parts of Asia Minor and returned home to become chief physician to the gladiator school in Pergamum, gaining much experience of treating wounds.
In the early s AD, Galen moved to Rome to work and, with the exception of a brief return to Pergamum, spent the remainder of his life in the Roman capital.
He became physician to the emperor Marcus Aurelius and would later serve in the same role to Aurelius's successors, Commodus and Septimius Severus.
Galen was the originator of the experimental method in medical investigation, and throughout his life dissected animals in his quest to understand how the body functions. Some of his anatomical and physiological observations were accurate - for example, he proved that urine was formed in the kidney as opposed to the bladder which was common belief.
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