Galen

“ If Galen had been a simple physician, one of the great body of medical practitioners in Rome, no one would be disposed to question the justice of the criticism which the distinguished Viennese historian makes of his decision to abandon that city at the moment of her distress and peril. But, as a matter of fact, Galen was not a practitioner of medicine in the full sense of that term. He treated cases of illness because in no other way would it be possible for him to acquire the necessary familiarity with disease ”

“ Galen on the throne!"
"He is too old and wise to let you try to do it!" Galen answered. "But you spoke about the head of a Medusa, Pertinax, and mentioned Lucius Septimius Severus. He commands three legions at Caruntum in Pannonia. (Roughly speaking, the S.W. portion of modern Hungary whose frontiers were then occupied by very warlike tribes.) If there is one man living who can freeze men's blood by scowling at them, it is he! And he is not as old as you are." ”

“ Sometimes, when I have dined unwisely, and there is no Galen near to freshen up my belly-juices, I have nightmares, in which men and women cry to me for water that I took from them to pour into the cities. I have learned this, Galen: Do one thing wisely and you will commit ten follies. You are lucky if you have but ten failures to detract from one success—as lucky as a man who has but ten mistresses to interfere with his enjoyment of his wife! ”

“ Although it is true that certain important anatomical and physiological facts are found recorded for the first time in the works of Galen, this must not be accepted as evidence that Galen himself is the real discoverer of these facts. The most that can be claimed for him is that he is the first writer to bring the facts in question to the knowledge of us moderns. When the ancient books that have been lost are once more brought to light, as they very well may be at any time, we shall be able, perhaps, to give credit where credit is due. ”

“ Thus matters stood, until one evening Galen embarked on an armed trawler that had been fitted out at the port to seek for mines floating down the Channel towards Havre. He had become a matelot in the French navy. One morning at dawn the vessel was struck by a mine outside the very roads of Etretat. Putting out, the lifeboat saved only one man—Galen, the fisherman. In rescuing him one man was lost overboard. That man was Hervé, Chrysale's lover, and Galen's rival in her affections. ”

“ Galen appears decidedly to have maintained with Hippocrates—‘that there is in the body no one beginning, but that all parts are alike, beginning and end: for a circle has no beginning.’ Agreeably to this idea, Galen remarks, that the brain cannot properly be said to derive its powers from the heart, since an animal will run, breathe, and cry after its heart has been taken out; nor can the heart be said properly to derive its powers from the brain, since it will palpitate and contract, after all communication with the brain is cut off, nay, after it has been removed from the body. ”

“ Galen aimed to create a perfect system of physiology, pathology, and treatment. He is alleged to have written 500 treatises on medicine, and 250 on other subjects, philosophy, laws, grammar. Nothing like this number remains, and the so-called “books” are often what we should call articles. His known and accepted medical works number eighty-five. All his writings were originally in Greek.
Oribasius.
Oribasius, like Galen, was a native of Pergamos, and was physician to and friend of the Emperor Julian. ”

“ Nothing was spared to obtain for the youth the best education available, though his father died when he was 21. After exhausting the Pergamos teachers, Galen studied at Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria. Then he travelled for some years through Cilicia, Phœnicia, Palestine, Scyros, and the Isles of Crete and Cyprus. He commenced practice at Pergamos when he was 29 and was appointed Physician to the School of Gladiators in that city. ”

“ Galen first studied medicine for four years under Satyrus in his native city of Pergamum, then under Pelops at Smyrna, later under Numisianus at Corinth and Alexandria. [536] This was about the time that the great mathematician and astronomer, Ptolemy, was completing his observations [537] in the neighborhood of Alexandria, but Galen does not mention him, despite his own belief that a first-rate physician should also know such subjects as [Pg 124] geometry and astronomy, music and rhetoric. ”

“ He writes that the doctors who attended Marcus Aurelius in the German wars dissected the dead bodies of the barbarians. The chief mistakes made by Galen as an anatomist were due to his assumption that what is true of the anatomy of a lower animal is true also when applied to man.
Galen greatly assisted the advance of physiology by recognizing that every part of the body exists for the purpose of performing a definite function. Aristotle, like Plato, had taught that "Nature makes nothing in vain," and Galen's philosophy was greatly influenced by the teaching of Aristotle. ”

“ Galen, who had no more divinity than what his physic taught him, barely upon the consideration of this so exact frame of the body, challenges any one, upon a hundred years' study, to find out how any the least fiber, or most minute particle, might be more commodiously placed, either for the advantage of use or comeliness. ”

“ Gerarde, in his “Historie of Plants,” refers to Galen as an authority, quoting from his “Faculties of Nourishments” in defence of the plant he selects, but does not seem to have heard of the old belief in its forming a food for the immortals, and can indeed give it no higher effect in staying the ravages of time and decay than that “the ashes of this Bulbe mixed with oile and hens grease cureth the falling of the haire.” ”

“ But young men will still be talking. The next great light was Galen; he studied at Alexandria, then the home of science. He, justly malcontent with quadrupeds, dissected apes, as coming nearer to man, and bled like a Trojan. ”

“ It seems to me therefore plain that Galen did all that lay in his power to advance the science of medicine; and whatever words of condemnation I may have employed in the text, when speaking of the Galenists, refer solely to those physicians of later centuries who were of such a narrow-minded type, so rigidly crystallized in the belief that Galen’s teachings had reached the limit of all possible knowledge in the science of medicine, that they did not hesitate to class the efforts of men like Vesalius as acts of unpardonable impiety. ”

“ Even Vesalius permitted himself to be influenced overmuch by Galen at points where we wonder that he did not make his observations for himself, since, apparently, they were so obvious. The more we know of Galen, however, the less surprised are we at his hold over the minds of men. ”

“ I consider that my opinions are corroborated by the well-known fact that whenever Palus appeared as a gladiator in the amphitheater, Galen was present in the arena as chief of the surgeons always at hand to dress the wounds of victors or of vanquished men who had won the approbation or favor of the spectators or of the Imperial party. True, Galen was often there when Palus was not in the arena, for he was always on the watch for anatomical knowledge to be had from observation of dying men badly wounded. ”

“ No one ever set before the medical profession a higher standard than Galen advanced, and few have more nearly approached it. He did not attach himself to any particular school, but studied the doctrines of each. The works of Galen constituted the last production of ancient Roman medicine, and from his day the decline in medical science was rapid, until it was revived among the Arabs.
The physical sciences, it must be confessed, were not carried by the ancients to any such length as geometry and astronomy. In physical geography they were particularly deficient. ”

“ And again, if the Peripatetic doctrine be true, that the soul is the “form” of the body, we are soon landed in the Stoic materialism from which Galen shrank. The soul will become, as in the well-known theory refuted in the Phaedo,2617 a “temperament” of bodily states, and its superior endurance, its immortality, will become a baseless dream. On these great questions the cautious man of science will not venture to come to any dogmatic conclusion.2618
Galen came to Rome in the year 164, at the beginning of the reign of M. Aurelius. ”

“ Play the man!"
XI. GALEN Galen's house was one he rented from a freedman of the emperor—a wise means of retaining favor at the palace. Landlords having influence were careful to protect good tenants. Furthermore, whoever rented, rather than possessed, escaped more easily from persecution. Galen, like Tyanan Apollonius, reduced his private needs, maintaining that philosophy went hand in hand with medicine, but wealth with neither.
It was a pleasant little house, not far away from Cornificia's, within a precinct that was rebuilt after all that part of Rome burned under Nero's fascinated gaze. ”

“ Galen adduces evidence to prove that Æsculapius did really practise medicine, by music and by gymnastics, or exercises on foot and horseback.
As Le Clerc says,339 this may have been patriotic exaggeration on the part of Galen. To Podalirius is attributed the invention of the art of bleeding. As he returned from the Trojan war, he was driven by a tempest on the shores of Caria, where a shepherd, having learned that he was a physician, took him to the king, whose daughter was sick. He cured her by bleeding from both arms; the king gave her to him in marriage, with a rich grant of land. ”

“ But Galen cautions youth against useless acquisitions, which he says are not arts at all: such as πεττευριπτεῖν, throwing the tali,—walking over a small tight rope,—whirling round without being giddy, like Myrmecides the Athenian and Callicrates the Spartan.—Protrept. ”

“ Galen was born at Pergamos, in Asia, in the second century; his learning was great, and his literary labours enormous. Having traversed Egypt and Greece, and acquired a knowledge of every science taught in the schools there, he settled in Rome. His works have been estimated at over 300 volumes—medical, 45physical, and metaphysical. He practised bleeding more frequently than his predecessors, but he gave very careful directions as to the conditions under which venesection should be resorted to, as well as to the quantity of blood to be taken. ”

“ Galen stored away oil and fat and left them to age until he had enough to last for a hundred years, including some from his father’s lifetime. He used some forty years old in one prescription. [567] He also traveled to many parts of the Roman Empire and procured rare drugs in the places where they were produced. Very interesting is his account of going out of his way in journeying back and forth between Rome and Pergamum in order to stop at Lemnos and procure a supply of the famous terra sigillata, a reddish clay stamped into pellets with the sacred seal of Diana. ”

“ An ingenious physiologist, a born experimenter, an excellent anatomist and eager to improve, possessing a good knowledge of the human skeleton and an accurate acquaintance with the internal parts so far as this can be derived from a most industrious devotion to dissection of animals, equipped with all the learning of the schools of Pergamon, Smyrna, and Alexandria, and rich with the experience of a vast practice at Rome, Galen is essentially an ‘efficient’ man. He has the grace to acknowledge constantly and repeatedly his indebtedness to the Hippocratic writings. ”

“ Galen’s ideal of anonymity.
Besides the ancient drug trade, Galen gives us some interesting glimpses of the publishing trade, if we may so term it, of his time. Writing in old age in the De methodo medendi, [575] he says that he has never attached his name to one of his works, never written for the popular ear or for fame, but fired by zeal for science and truth, or at the urgent request of friends, or as a useful exercise for himself, or, as now, in order to forget his old age. Popular fame is only an impediment to those who desire to live tranquilly and enjoy the fruits of philosophy. ”

“ Not the wildest venture of criticism could so trample on chronology as to maintain that the author of the Acts borrowed from these treatises of Galen; and conversely I have no desire to suggest that Galen borrowed from St Luke. But if so, the facts are a warning against certain methods of criticism which find favour in this age. To sober critics, the coincidence will merely furnish an additional illustration of the permanence of type which forms so striking a feature in the great Roman families. ”

“ I ask you not to allow me to fall into the hands of my enemies, but to take your sword and rush upon me.” And Galen did not hesitate but stabbed him with his dagger. The king came and found him dead. There were some at the time who said that Merovech’s words, which we have just reported, were an invention of the queen, and that Merovech had been secretly killed at her command. Galen was seized and his hands, feet, ears, and the end of his nose were cut off, and he was subjected to many other tortures and met a cruel death. ”

“ When we consider that these experiments are the first of their kind of which history makes mention, that they were carried out nearly seventeen hundred years ago, and that—so far as we know—they sprang entirely from the brain of the experimenter, we may well express unlimited admiration for Claudius Galen.
Daniel Le Clerc says that Galen’s principal treatise on human physiology, entitled “Utility of the Different Parts of the Human Body,” constitutes a chef-d’oeuvre which has challenged the admiration of physicians and philosophers in all ages. ”