Galen (129–216 CE)
Claudius Galenus, usually referred to as Galen, was born in Pergamon (in modern-day western Turkey), to wealthy, if dissimilar, parents. His father was an architect, a just and benevolent man, but he considered his mother a foul-tempered shrew, leading Galen to vow to ‘embrace and love the former qualities and to avoid and hate the latter’.
His education commenced at Pergamon, itself a noted centre of learning, and he studied the main philosophical disciplines of the era, before commencing medical studies at the age of 17.38 He continued his medical studies at Smyrna and Alexandria and other locations. His first professional job was working as a surgeon to gladiators at Pergamon, then he subsequently moved to Rome at around the age of 31. In Rome, he rapidly gained a reputation as a brilliant, though outspoken, surgeon, but made enemies in medical circles and withdrew to Pergamon around 168 CE, but returned to Rome within a year.Galen was nothing if not prolific as a medical author, and may have written as many as 500 works on anatomy, physiology, medicine and philosophy; not all survived, but there is still a huge collection of treatises that remain extant. He undoubtedly benefited from the work of his predecessors, and was notably respectful to Hippocrates, though he was clearly a pioneer in many aspects of anatomy and surgery. It is interesting to reflect that Hippocrates died some 500 years before Galen was born! He accepted and promoted Hippocrates’ humoural theory, bloodletting and other areas subsequently found to be plain wrong, but, like Hippocrates, understood the importance of the body’s natural ability to heal.
Key texts related to herbal remedies include On the Powers (and Mixtures) of Simple Remedies, On the Composition of Drugs According to Places and On the Composition of Drugs According to Kind.
Galen treated imbalances in the four humours or fluids; drugs were composed of animal, vegetable or mineral substances.39 Great emphasis was placed on authenticity and condition of the substance, e.g. the visual appearance of myrrh and costus, crocus stamens to be bright yellow with a pleasant scent; cinnamon bark should have a pleasant warming fragrance, etc. Galen grouped certain plants by function: major ‘opening’ roots, e.g. fennel, celery, asparagus, parsley, butcher’s broom; ‘warm’ seeds, e.g. aniseed, cumin, coriander, fennel; ‘cold’ seeds, e.g. watermelon, cucumber, squash, melon; cordial flowers, e.g. rose, violet, borage. Primary effective qualities were considered to be hot/cold or dry/moist; there were also secondary (e.g. relaxing, astringing, softening, hardening, etc) and tertiary effective qualities (e.g. purgative or promoting sweat, etc.). The first two levels were used to treat the opposite of the particular effective quality. He used various other grading parameters for his prescriptions – some 475 remedies are recorded in his extant works.Galen’s work continued to influence medicine until the seventeenth century or later, even though his anatomical work was rendered incorrect by Renaissance scientists.