GALEN: THE MAN AND HIS TIMES
By Professor LYNN THORNDIKE
WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
FOR about fifteen centuries the name of Galen dominated the study of medicine. But at the close of the nineteenth century an English student of the history of medicine said, "Galen is so inaccessible to English readers that it is difficult to learn about him at first hand." Another wrote, "There is, perhaps, no other instance of a man of equal intellectual rank who has been so persistently misunderstood and even misinterpreted." A third obstacle has been that while critical editions of some single works have recently been published by Helmreich and others, no complete edition even of the Greek text of Galen has appeared since that of Kühn of a century ago, which is now regarded as very faulty. A fourth reason for neglect or misunderstanding of Galen is probably that there is so much by him to be read. Athenaeus stated that Galen wrote more treatises than any other Greek, and although many are now lost, more particularly of his logical and philosophical writings, his collected extant works fill some twenty volumes averaging a thousand pages each. There are often no chapter headings or other brief clues to the contents, which must be ploughed through slowly and thoroughly, since some of the most valuable bits of information come in quite incidentally or by way of unexpected digression. Besides errors in the printed text there are numerous words not found in most classical dictionaries. It is therefore perhaps not surprising, in the words of one of the English historians of medicine quoted above, that "few physicians or even scholars in the present day can claim to have read through this vast collection."
Yet Galen deserves to be remembered, not merely as one of the great names, but as one of most original minds and attractive personalities in all the long history of medicine. It is not difficult to make out the the main events of his life, his works supply an unusual amount of personal information, and throughout them, unless he is merely transcribing past prescriptions, he talks like a living man, detailing incidents of daily life and making upon the reader a vivid and unaffected impression of reality. Daremberg said of Galen that the exuberance of his imagination and his vanity frequently make us smile. It is true that his pharmacology and therapeutics often strike the modern reader as ridiculous, but he did not imagine them; they were the medicine of his age. It is true that he mentions cases which he has cured and those
