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Galen














Sarah Austin
Dr. Patrick
Science and Medicine A
November 18th













Galen
Galen was one of the pioneers of medicine following in the footsteps of men such as Hippocrates and Aristotle. Civilization has retained a large amount of his work. His theories remained dominant in medical thought for 1400 years after his death. His writings and theories survived for so long because his system was so comprehensive, and while he made several large mistakes, his overall system was a great achievement considering the limited facts that he was working with.
Galen was born in 130 A.D. His mother and father had very different temperaments. She was a very shrewish woman who would lose her temper and bite the maids; while his father-who was an engineer or an architect-was an “amiable, just, worthy, {and} benevolent” man. While Galen professed a hatred of his mother’s temperament, it was hers that he inherited as opposed to his fathers. Galen was given a liberal education and by 17 or 18 years old was fully acquainted with “Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic and Epicurean philosophies” (Brock 163). He decided to become a doctor at 16 because of a dream his father had one night. He began to study in Pergamum; he Left Pergamum for Smyrna after his father’s death to study with Pelops the physician and Albinus the peripatetic. He roamed through Greece, Cillicia, Phoenicia, Palestine, Crete, Cyprus and Alexandria to learn more about medicine. Alexandria was the best medical school in the educated world, even though human dissection had been outlawed (Brock 163). Once he had finished his studies in Alexandria, he returned to Pergamum as surgeon to the Gladiators; this allowed him to study human anatomy through the gladiator’s...