Background

Galen was born into the intellectual and social elite of the culturally Greek city of Pergamon (near the northwest coast of Roman Asia, in present-day Turkey) in September 129 to the family of an architect and builder Aelius Nicon. His father was a wealthy patrician with eclectic interests including philosophy, mathematics, logic, astronomy, agriculture, and literature. Galen describes his father as a "highly amiable, just, good and benevolent man."

Education

Galen lays great stress on his own early education in mathematics and geometry, and on his passion for logic, seeing these disciplines as providing a model of secure proof lacking from the philosophical debates of the post-Hellenistic schools which were dominant in his day. From the age of fourteen, however, he also acquired a significant education in philosophy. This involved attendance at the (closely text-based) lecture courses of professors of one or more of the four established philosophical schools: Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean; indeed, Galen mentions an adherent of each as part of his early education. From the age of sixteen, he also commenced his medical studies, although the study of philosophy continued concurrently. After his father’s death in 149, he undertook an educational journey of several years, involving periods in Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria, to study with the foremost medical teachers of the time. This study also involved a strong textual element, and - alongside actual anatomy (for which Alexandria remained a major center, although dissection at this period was restricted to non-human animals) - Galen acquired an in-depth knowledge of the medical, as well as the philosophical, writings of his predecessors.

Career

In 157 Galen returned to his home city, taking up an official post as a doctor to the gladiators, before moving to Rome in the early 160s, where - after one more brief period back in Pergamon - he settled permanently. At Rome, Galen seems to have developed his status very quickly amongst the socio-intellectual elite - which significantly included devotees of philosophy, in particular Aristotelians. Galen quickly shone as a self-publicizing medical practitioner; he also gave public lectures and anatomical demonstrations in a highly competitive intellectual environment. Much of his anatomical work, as well as the inception of two great works central to the establishment of his reputation, The Function of the Parts of the Body and The Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, belongs to this early period. The former text aims to establish the purposive, indeed divine, construction, understood in relation to its particular function (chreia), of every anatomical feature of the body, and explicitly models itself on Aristotelian biological work. The latter constitutes both an exposition of Platonic tripartite psychology, with a vigorous polemic against the Stoic monist alternative, and a synthesis of this Platonic view with Galen’s physiology of brain, heart, and liver; it contains an account of the famous experiment whereby the function of the brain (in Galen’s terms, the fact that it is the seat of the "leading-part" of the soul) is demonstrated by ligation of the spinal cord of a live pig.

Adopted as court physician by the emperor Marcus Aurelius (who ruled 161-180), then co-reigning with Lucius Verus, Galen was also fortunate to be spared a lengthy military campaign with the two emperors in central Europe; to this period (169-176), indeed, he ascribes the writing-up of a large number of his major works in scientific and medical theory.

Galen’s court career apparently continued through the reigns of Marcus’ successors, Commodus (180-192) and Septimius Severus (193–211); this later phase of his career includes some of his major medical works, in particular: the magnum opus The Method of Healing; and much of his extremely voluminous series of writings on drugs, and equally voluminous body of commentaries on Hippocrates (together constituting nearly half his extant output). Galen lived through both Commodus’ notorious reign of terror and a disastrous fire, in 192, in which he lost a substantial personal library: both experiences are described in the recently-discovered ethical work, Avoiding Distress, which also adds to our knowledge of his extraordinary scholarly activity (including not least his work on the Aristotelian tradition). It is possible, but not certain, that Galen’s extant ethical writings should also be dated to this later phase of his life (after 192). Towards the end of his life, certainly, he wrote a "philosophical testament," My Own Doctrines, which gives a concise but important insight into his attitudes to a range of philosophical questions.

Galen amassed a considerable fortune, including a second home in Campania; he must have had a considerable intellectual influence on medical life at Rome, although such influence is not attested until a considerably later period. The traditional date of his death is around 200, but some later sources suggest that he was still alive more than ten years after this.

Galen was both a universal genius and a prolific writer: about 300 titles of works by him are known, of which about 150 survive wholly or in part. He was perpetually inquisitive, even in areas remote from medicine, such as linguistics, and he was an important logician who wrote major studies of the scientific method. Galen was also a skilled polemicist and an incorrigible publicist of his own genius, and these traits, combined with the enormous range of his writings, help to explain his subsequent fame and influence.

Achievements

• 

  Galen’s writings achieved wide circulation during his lifetime, and copies of some of his works survive that were written within a generation of his death. By 500 his works were being taught and summarized at Alexandria, and his theories were already crowding out those of others in the medical handbooks of the Byzantine world. Greek manuscripts began to be collected and translated by enlightened Arabs in the 9th century, and about 850 Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, an Arab physician at the court of Baghdad, prepared an annotated list of 129 works of Galen that he and his followers had translated from Greek into Arabic or Syriac. Learned medicine in the Arabic world thus became heavily based upon the commentary, exposition, and understanding of Galen.
  
  Galen’s influence was initially almost negligible in western Europe except for drug recipes, but from the late 11th century Ḥunayn’s translations, commentaries on them by Arab physicians, and sometimes the original Greek writings themselves were translated into Latin. These Latin versions came to form the basis of medical education in the new medieval universities. From about 1490, Italian humanists felt the need to prepare new Latin versions of Galen directly from Greek manuscripts in order to free his texts from medieval preconceptions and misunderstandings. Galen’s works were first printed in Greek in their entirety in 1525, and printings in Latin swiftly followed. These texts offered a different picture from that of the Middle Ages, one that emphasized Galen as a clinician, a diagnostician, and above all, an anatomist. His new followers stressed his methodical techniques of identifying and curing illness, his independent judgment, and his cautious empiricism. Galen’s injunctions to investigate the body were eagerly followed since physicians wished to repeat the experiments and observations that he had recorded. Paradoxically, this soon led to the overthrow of Galen’s authority as an anatomist. In 1543 the Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius showed that Galen’s anatomy of the body was more animal than human in some of its aspects, and it became clear that Galen and his medieval followers had made many errors. Galen’s notions of physiology, by contrast, lasted for a further century, until the English physician William Harvey correctly explained the circulation of the blood. The renewal and then the overthrow of the Galenic tradition in the Renaissance had been an important element in the rise of modern science, however.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Galen: Psychological Writings

    (All Galen's surviving shorter works on psychology and eth...)

    2017
  • Galen: Method of Medicine, Volume II: Books 5-9

    (Galen of Pergamum, the physician to the court of the empe...)

    2011
  • Galen: Method of Medicine, Volume I: Books 1-4

    (Galen of Pergamum, physician to the court of the emperor ...)

    2011
  • Galen: Method of Medicine, Volume III: Books 10-14

    (Galen of Pergamum, physician to the court of the emperor ...)

    2011
  • Galen: On the Natural Faculties

    (If the work of Hippocrates is taken as representing the f...)

    1916
  • Selected Works

    (Galen, researcher and scholar, surgeon and philosopher, l...)

    1997
  • Galen: On Respiration and the Arteries

    (Professors Furley and Wilkie have provided a newly edited...)

    1984
  • Galen on Food and Diet

    (Galen, the personal physician of the emperor Marcus Aurel...)

    2002
  • Galen: On Antecedent Causes

    (This new edition of a short but fascinating text by Galen...)

    1998
  • On the Therapeutic Method: Books I and II

    (Hankinson provides here the first translation into any mo...)

    1991
  • Galen on the Affected Parts

    (Galen encompasses the best Hippocratic teaching; his dida...)

    1976
  • Galen: On the Properties of Foodstuffs

    (Until recently an English translation of Galen's On the P...)

    2007
  • Galen on Anatomical Procedures: The Later Books

    (Galen was probably the greatest medical writer of antiqui...)

    1962
  • The Alexandrian Epitomes of Galen: Volume 1: On the Medical Sects for Beginners; The Small Art of Medicine; On the Elements According to the Opinion

    (The second-century physician and philosopher Galen is not...)

    2015
  • Galen on Language and Ambiguity: An English Translation of Galen's de Captionibus (on Fallacies), with Introduction, Text and Commentary 1997
  • On Semen 1992
  • Galen: On Diseases and Symptoms 2011
  • On examinations by which the best physicians are recognized 1988
  • Galen: On Problematical Movements 2015
  • Three Treatises on the Nature of Science 1985
  • Galen. On My Own Opinions 2000
  • On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato 1984
  • On prognosis 1979

Religion

Galen was some kind of theist. His philosophical theology is seen in his texts, where he argues that the manifest suitedness of biological organisms and individual structures - especially those observed in anatomy - to their functions clearly proves their organization by some extraordinary, even divine, intelligence. In line with his epistemic caution, however, he is not able to be specific about the nature or identity of this divine intelligence. The key feature of Galen’s theology is the role it plays in teleological explanation (although the teleological account is at times presented in quite strikingly anthropomorphic terms).

Yet there are traces of a more specific theological philosophy. The view of the heavenly bodies as intelligent appears both in Quod animi mores corporis temperamenta sequantur and in De usu partium; and although it is presented in somewhat vague terms, it motivates specific philosophical arguments. The heavenly world is transcendently good and superior; yet it has an influence - at some remove - on our lower world. (The way in which the heavenly bodies affect our world includes astrological influence; although this is not a major part of Galen’s thought, the existence of such influence is explicitly asserted, for example in De diebus decretoriis) Consideration of the relationship between the heavenly realm and our everyday world leads to two specific types of conclusion: one, that our consciousness of the operation of higher intelligence in this lower world should make us aware how much more admirable and perfect must be its operation in that higher one; two, that there is a problem in imagining how the highest intelligence could “stoop” to affect the operations of the lowest level of biological organism.

Again there is the distinction to be made between the essentials about which Galen is certain - here, that there is a purposive intelligence manifest throughout the universe - and the specifics, speculation about which may lead ultimately to aporia.

Galen also claims to have had personal experience of the interventions of specific gods within the Greek polytheistic world (most notably of Asclepius, the god of medicine). If it seems difficult to reconcile such a conventional, anthropomorphic manifestation of religion with the philosophical view of God as a teleological cause or as immanent Nature, it should perhaps be said that such a co-existence of abstract theology with traditional individual gods is by no means confined to Galen, amongst Graeco-Roman philosophical writers (one could mention both Plato and Epictetus in this context). In any case, it is to the divine intelligence manifest throughout the universe, rather than to any individual god, that Galen constantly returns; it is this intelligence which is the object of his religious - and by the same token of his intellectual, indeed his scientific - fervor.

Politics

Not being directly involved in politics himself, Galen is known as a physician to a number of political figures of his time.

Views

There may be identified three central roles of philosophy in Galen’s work. One, to which he himself gives particular prominence, is the theory of demonstration: this underlies explanations and accounts in the natural world, enables the person trained in it to distinguish secure from merely probable or downright fallacious arguments, and guarantees the reliability of propositions arrived at through its correct application. A second is that Galen’s scientific and medical accounts themselves - of the theory of physical elements, for example, or of causation and change - engage with existing philosophical debates (e.g., between continuum theorists and atomists, or between teleologists and mechanists); and that he here relies strongly on philosophical explanatory categories (e.g., telos, the form-matter distinction). Philosophical technical language and argumentation are also to the fore in specifically medical realms, such as the theory of health or the classification of types of pulse: here too we find a constant drive towards definition and linguistic disambiguation, highly complex schemes of subdivision, and the employment of philosophical vocabulary (e.g., ousia, eidos, sumbebēkos).

Thirdly, there are those areas of philosophy which are not of direct importance to scientific or medical knowledge but constitute separate intellectual domains, in which Galen nevertheless wishes to make a distinctive contribution. Particularly relevant here is the domain of ethics; one may regard some of his efforts in logic and linguistic studies in the same light.

The area of “psychology” or philosophy of mind, meanwhile, in a sense comes under both the second and the third heading: Galen’s discussions of mind or soul (psychē) are situated in a complex relationship both with the philosophical, especially Platonic, tradition and with Galen’s medical and physiological theories.

Galen regarded anatomy as the foundation of medical knowledge, and he frequently dissected and experimented on such lower animals as the Barbary ape (or African monkey), pigs, sheep, and goats. Galen’s advocacy of dissection, both to improve surgical skills and for research purposes, formed part of his self-promotion, but there is no doubt that he was an accurate observer. He distinguished seven pairs of cranial nerves, described the valves of the heart, and observed the structural differences between arteries and veins. One of his most important demonstrations was that the arteries carry blood, not air, as had been taught for 400 years. Notable also were his vivisection experiments, such as tying off the recurrent laryngeal nerve to show that the brain controls the voice, performing a series of transections of the spinal cord to establish the functions of the spinal nerves, and tying off the ureters to demonstrate kidney and bladder functions. Galen was seriously hampered by the prevailing social taboo against dissecting human corpses, however, and the inferences he made about human anatomy based on his dissections of animals often led him into errors. His anatomy of the uterus, for example, is largely that of the dog's.

Galen’s physiology was a mixture of ideas taken from the philosophers Plato and Aristotle as well as from the physician Hippocrates, whom Galen revered as the fount of all medical learning. Galen viewed the body as consisting of three connected systems: the brain and nerves, which are responsible for sensation and thought; the heart and arteries, responsible for life-giving energy; and the liver and veins, responsible for nutrition and growth. According to Galen, blood is formed in the liver and is then carried by the veins to all parts of the body, where it is used up as nutriment or is transformed into flesh and other substances. A small amount of blood seeps through the lungs between the pulmonary artery and pulmonary veins, thereby becoming mixed with air, and then seeps from the right to the left ventricle of the heart through minute pores in the wall separating the two chambers. A small proportion of this blood is further refined in a network of nerves at the base of the skull (in reality found only in ungulates) and the brain to make psychic pneuma, a subtle material that is the vehicle of sensation. Galen’s physiological theory proved extremely seductive, and few possessed the skills needed to challenge it in succeeding centuries.

Building on earlier Hippocratic conceptions, Galen believed that human health requires an equilibrium between the four main bodily fluids, or humors - blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Each of the humour is built up from the four elements and displays two of the four primary qualities: hot, cold, wet, and dry. Unlike Hippocrates, Galen argued that humoral imbalances can be located in specific organs, as well as in the body as a whole. This modification of the theory allowed doctors to make more precise diagnoses and to prescribe specific remedies to restore the body’s balance. As a continuation of earlier Hippocratic conceptions, Galenic physiology became a powerful influence in medicine for the next 1,400 years.

Quotations: "The fact is that those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn! "

"Much music marreth men's manners."

"Employment is Nature's physician, and is essential to human happiness."

"The best physician is also a philosopher."

"Every animal is sad after coitus except the human female and the rooster."

Personality

In the year 162, age 33, when Galen arrived to Rome his medical teachings contradicted the methods of Rome’s established physicians, who deeply resented him – Galen described them as unscrupulous thieves, more interested in money than healing and truth. Galen abruptly ended his sojourn in the capital in 166. Although he claimed that the intolerable envy of his colleagues prompted his return to Pergamum, an impending plague in Rome was probably a more compelling reason.

Quotes from others about the person

• "We doctors have always been a simple trusting folk. Did we not believe Galen implicitly for 1500 years and Hippocrates for more than 2000?" - William Osler, Canadian physician
  
  "Employment, which Galen calls 'Nature's Physician,' is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery." - Robert A. Burton, American physician, novelist, nonfiction author, and columnist

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle

Connections

There is no information on whether Galen was ever married or had any children.

Father:

Aelius Nicon

employer:

Lucius Commodus

employer:

Marcus Aurelius

employer:

Septimius Severus

employer:

Marcus Antoninus

teacher:

Eudemus of Rhodes

References

• The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire
  2013
• Galen and the Gateway to Medicine
  2012
• Galen: A Thinking Doctor in Imperial Rome
  2020