Galen: a short introduction

My previous post relates to a prescription recorded in Galen's Compound Drugs by Kind, but I have come to realise that many people interested in ancient history do not know that much about this famous medical writer. Indeed, when I discussed the prescription which is the topic of the previous post, some of the students had never heard of him. So, this blog will give a quick outline of who he was and why he ought to be known.

Galen from the Anicia Juliana copy of Dioscorides (510 CE), held in the Austrian National Library

I will not go into deep detail. If you want to know more, I thoroughly recommend Susan P. Mattern's The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire (2013), Oxford University Press. Not only does this book discuss the Galen the man, but also touches on his huge legacy to the development of medicine, but also gives an amazing overview of the world in which he lived. I consider myself a Roman social historian, and the way her writing made the city of Rome especially come to life in my imagination as the seedy, grotty, pestilential city it was, was amazing. That said, the history of medicine, especially anatomy, is not for the faint of heart. Some of the procedures this work describes Galen as performing are very confronting; animal cruelty was a way of life in the ancient world, and Mattern does not sugarcoat it. Considering this a warning, and don't blame me if you read this book and find that content disturbing. I sure did.

Moving on, Galen was born in the city of Pergamum (in modern Turkiye) in the late September of 129 CE. His father and his grandfather before him were successful architects, and he was born into a wealthy household. As would be expected, this meant that he had an excellent education. His father started overseeing his education as was typical for the period with a focus on philosophy. Following a dream, he then expanded his son's education into medicine (145/6 CE). 

As said, Galen's family was very wealthy, so he eventually travels (starting around 150 CE maybe?) a lot in pursuit of his medical education; in fact, he seems to stalk the students of a famous but already dead doctor named Quintus all around the eastern Mediterranean. After his travels, he returns to Pergamum (157) and is asked by a local priest become doctor to the city's gladiators. An aside on gladiators in the Greek parts of the Roman empire: these were normally associated with the worship of the Roman emperor, so the priest would be someone of high influence in this city, given this associated with the imperial cult. This means that this role was a huge honour, even though gladiators were extremely low class, if not slaves. That noted, Galen seems to have been rather class-blind when it came to patients: he seems to have treated all classes equally. Also, he was a "gentleman" doctor. Given his family wealth, he was independently wealthy, and thus did not charge for his services. This did not preclude him accepting gifts. In Rome, he accepted 400 gold coins (aureii) from a former consul for healing his wife. This was an astronomical sum.

After a while, he leaves Pergamum eventually arriving in Rome (161-2 CE). He makes a huge name for himself in the imperial capital. But after a few years, he returns to Pergamum (166 CE), leaving Rome before he was approached by the Roman emperors to take an official position on account of the plague which had just started to sweep the empire. He did not escape the expected knock on the door; a few years later he was summoned by Marcus Aurelius to join him with his army in Aquileia, an Italian town at the head of the Adriatic Sea (168 CE). He manages to talk himself out of accompanying the army against Germanic tribes and returns to Rome to oversee the health of Marcus Aurelius' son, Commodus (169 CE). Yes, that Commodus. No, I do not like the movie Gladiator. It is historically rubbish, though Joacquin Phoenix's depiction of Commodus was excellent. 

Galen spends most of the rest of his life in Rome from this period. There have been arguments about when he died (a Byzantine source says he lived 70 years, but a death date of 199 CE is almost universally considered incorrect), with a now near consensus that he died in 216/7. As for where he died, numerous towns claim to hold his tomb, from the town of Asyut near Aswan in Egypt to Palermo in Italy.

So why should ancient historians and classicists know Galen. Well, about 1/8 of all extant classical Greek literature was written by Galen! Most students know about Hippocrates. Everyone knows Homer. We teach our students from a fairly tight cannon of texts, and yet the largest corpus of classical Greek material is rarely referred to in undergraduate courses. Like his place of death, there is no agreement about how much Galen actually wrote. I have read estimates between 300 and 600 works. Of these, 127 have survived today. And more of his works were found this century. In 2005, a scholar visiting Vlatadon Monastery at Thessaloniki noticed in an index of manuscripts the name Avoiding Distress. This work was known by scholars but thought lost. The manuscript also contained three other works which were thought not to have survived in their entirety. 

There are some 23 works which are attributed to Galen but thought by scholars to have not been written by him. Counterfeit Galen works were circulating even in Galen's lifetime. At the start of Galen's essay, My Own Books, he describes how he witnessed a man buy a book that was sold under his name, and how another man looked at it and immediately said it was a fake because he recognised that the style of writing was not Galen's. Galen does not describe interceding in the argument, and seemingly stood back and enjoyed that he was its cause and that someone he considered highly educated could recognise his writing in a few lines. Yes, such behaviour was in character for him.

Such was the immediate influence of Galen, there are parts of his work found in Egyptian papyri dating from the early 3rd Century CE, so likely written within a decade or less of his death. This means that his writings had been copied either in part or in entirety enough during his lifetime and within years of his death, that enough bits and pieces have made their way into the corpus of surviving papyri. This influence continued for centuries. Galen, especially his works on anatomy, were not improved upon until the work of Vesalius in the 16th Century. In the interceding years, his works were copied, shared, and translated into various language, including Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin. As for his ongoing legacy, next time you go to the doctor and they ask you what you have done differently to try and work out what his wrong with you, they are using the methods developed and promoted by Galen in his writing.

So Galen, he is kind of a big deal, both in classics and medical history. From an ancient social historian's perspective, his works contain many nuggets of interesting material: that which expands upon our understanding of daily life in his period, to issues of book history, with his description of how literary works were disseminated in antiquity being of great interest to me. Unfortunately, much of his writing has not been translated into modern languages, let alone English. 

I will give the final word on Galen to Susan Mattern (p. 289):

Galen was egotistical, arrogant, bossy, bombastic; he was an unapologetic owner of slaves and possibly, by some definitions, a mysogynist. He was not necessarily a good man. But he was a good doctor.

Some References:

Susan P. Mattern's The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire (2013), Oxford University Press.

Galen, Selected Works, translated by Peter Singer, (1997) Oxford University Press.

Singer, P. N., and Ralph M. Rosen (eds), 'List of Galen’s Works: Titles, Editions, Translations, and Online Resources', The Oxford Handbook of Galen, Oxford Handbooks (2024).

Mattern's The Prince of Medicine, and Singer's translation of some of Galen's works can be read online if you log into Internet Archive. The List of Galen's Works is freely available.