Galen

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For other uses, see Galen (disambiguation).
Galen.
Galen.

Galen (Greek: Γαληνός, Galēnos; Latin: Claudius Galenus; AD 129[1] –ca. 200 or 216) of Pergamon was a prominent ancient Greek[2] physician, whose theories dominated Western medical science for well over a millennium. The forename "Claudius", absent in Greek texts, was first documented in texts from the Renaissance.

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[edit] Life

Galen was born in the ancient Greek city Pergamon, Mysia - then part of the Roman Empire - now Bergama, Turkey.[1] The son of the wealthy architect Nicon, he had eclectic interests — agriculture, architecture, astronomy, astrology, philosophy — before finally concentrating on medicine.

By the age of 20, he had served for four years in the local temple as a therapeutes ("attendant" or "associate") of the god Asclepius. Although Galen studied the human body, dissection of human corpses was against Roman law, so instead he used pigs, apes, and other animals. The legal limitations forced on him led to quite a number of mistaken ideas about the body. For instance, he thought a group of blood vessels near the back of the brain, the rete mirabile, was common in humans, but it is only in animals. After his father's death in 148/149, he left Pergamon to study in Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria for the next 12 years. In 157, Galen returned to his native city, where he worked for three or four years as a physician in a gladiator school. During this time he gained much experience with treating trauma and especially wounds, which he later called "windows into the body".

Galen performed many audacious operations — including brain and eye surgeries — that were not tried again for almost two millennia. To perform cataract surgery, he would insert a long needle-like instrument into the eye behind the lens; He would then pull the instrument back slightly to remove the cataract. The slightest slip could have caused permanent blindness.

Galen moved to Rome in 162. There he lectured, wrote extensively, and performed public demonstrations of his anatomical knowledge. He soon gained a reputation as an experienced physician, attracting to his practice a large number of clients. Among them was the consul Flavius Boethius, who introduced him to the imperial court, where he became a physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Despite being a member of the court, Galen reputedly shunned Latin, preferring to speak and write in his native Greek, a tongue that was actually quite popular in Rome. He would go on to treat Roman luminaries such as Lucius Verus, Commodus, and Septimius Severus. However, in 166 Galen returned to Pergamon again, where he lived until he went back to Rome for good in 169.

Galen spent the rest of his life at the Roman imperial court, where he was given leave to write and experiment. He performed vivisections of numerous animals to study the function of the kidneys and the spinal cord. His favorite animal subject was the Barbary Macaque.

Galen identified veins (dark red) and arterial (brighter and thinner) blood, each with distinct and separate functions. Venous blood was thought to originate in the liver and arterial blood in the heart; the blood flowed from those organs to all parts of the body where it was consumed.

It has been reported that Galen employed 20 scribes to write down his words.[citation needed] In 191, a fire in the Temple of Peace destroyed some of his records. Because of a reference in the 10th century Suda lexicon, the year of Galen's death has traditionally been placed at around 200. However, since some scholars argue that textual evidence shows Galen writing as late as 207, they contend that he lived longer, the latest year proposed being 216.[3]

[edit] Legacy

Of Galen’s 600 books, just 20 survive. They were lost in the destruction of the library at Alexandria and in the general chaos associated with the collapse of the Roman empire. The Arabs captured and preserved some ancient medical texts during the golden age and expansion of the Arab Empire - only those works exist today.[4]

Hunayn ibn Ishaq's translation (c.830-870) of 129 of Galen's works into Arabic, in particular Galen's insistence on a rational systematic approach to medicine, set the template for Islamic medicine, which rapidly spread throughout the Arab Empire. The Arabs held Galen in highest regard.[5] As the title "Doubts on Galen" of a book by Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi (Rhazes) (d. 925) makes clear, as well as the writings of Ibn al-Nafis, the works of Galen were not taken on unquestioningly, but as a challengeable basis for further enquiry. A strong emphasis on experimentation and empiricism led to new results and new observations, which were contrasted and combined with those of Galen by writers such as Razi, Ali ibn Abbas al-Majusi (Haly Abbas), Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi (Abulasis), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar) and Ibn al-Nafis.

Constantine the African helped reintroduce Greek medicine to Europe. His translations of Arabic versions of Hippocrates and Galen first gave the West a view of Greek medicine as a whole.[6]

Later, in medieval Europe, Galen's writings on anatomy became the mainstay of the medieval physician's university curriculum. Unlike pagan Rome, Christian Europe did not forbid the dissection and autopsy of the human body and such examinations were carried out regularly from at least the 14th century. However, Galen's influence, as in the Arab world, was so great that when dissections discovered anomalies in Galen's anatomy, the physicians often tried to fit these into the Galenic system. An example of this is Mondino de Liuzzi, who describes rudimentary blood circulation in his writings but still asserts that the left ventricle should contain air.

In the 1530s, Belgian anatomist and physician Andreas Vesalius took on a project to translate many of Galen's Greek texts into Latin. Vesalius' most famous work, De humani corporis fabrica, was greatly influenced by Galenic writing and form. Seeking to examine critically Galen's methods and outlook, Vesalius turned to human cadaver dissection as a means of verification. Galen's writings were frequently disproved by Vesalius, who demonstrated Galen's errors through books and hands-on demonstrations. The examinations of Vesalius also disproved medical theories of Aristotle and Mondino de Liuzzi.

Since some of Galen's writings were translated into Arabic, the Middle East knows and reveres him as "Jalinos".[7]

Galen's emphasis on bloodletting as a remedy for almost any ailment remained influential until well into the 1800s.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b "Galen". Encyclopædia Britannica IV. (1984). Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.. p. 385. 
  2. ^ Galen of Pergamum
  3. ^ Nutton, Vivian (1973-05). "The Chronology of Galen's Early Career". The Classical Quarterly 23 (1): 169. ISSN 00098388. 
  4. ^ Channel 4 - History - Ancient surgery
  5. ^ How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs
  6. ^ Constantine the African
  7. ^ Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (2001), 37-39.


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