Anatomical And Medical Studies

Introduction-

Galen (129-216 CE) was a Greek physician, author, and philosopher, working in Rome, who influenced both medical theory and practice until the middle of the 17th century CE. Owning a large, personal library, he wrote hundreds of medical treatises including anatomical, physiological, pharmaceutical, and therapeutic works. With principles based on his anatomical dissections, he spoke and wrote extensively on the anatomy of the body emphasizing the role of the heart, brain, and blood. While he criticized many of his contemporaries, he embraced the ideas put forth by the Greek physician and theorist Hippocrates (460-370 BCE), primarily his concept of the four humours that controlled the human condition: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.

Much of our knowledge of early medicine comes from Galen’s writings. Like Hippocrates and other theorists Galen believed that illness was caused by an imbalance, so how does one restore the balance: bleeding, enemas, and vomiting. Aside from his writings on medicine, he wrote extensively on language, logic, psychology, ethics, and even moral philosophy. Regrettably, most of his works no longer exist or survive only in fragments. He lost many of his writings, instruments, and medicines in a storeroom fire in 192 CE.

Early Life & Education

Born in 129 CE in the Asia Minor city of Pergamon, Galen was the son of the wealthy architect Nikon and was initially educated in both rhetoric and philosophy. The Pergamon of his youth was home to a sanctuary dedicated to the god of medicine Asclepius. His father, a member of the Roman elite, had assisted in the renovation of Pergamon’s temple complex dedicated to Zeus. At the age of 16, Galen changed educational directions, possibly at the suggestion of his father, and decided to study medicine, eventually completing his schooling at both Smyrna, located on the Aegean coast, and Alexandria where he studied both anatomical science and physiological theory. At the time Alexandria was the premier center for the study of medicine in the ancient world. After the death of his father in 149/50 CE, he continued his studies as he traveled throughout the Mediterranean. In 157 CE he returned to his home town of Pergamon to be the physician to a group of gladiators; a position that provided him with an opportunity to study anatomy

 

“GALEN BELIEVED THAT THE KNOWLEDGE OF ANATOMY WAS VITAL TO A PHYSICIAN. “

 

Career in Rome

By the 2nd century CE, Pergamon had fallen under the control of the Roman Empire. Never marrying, Galen eventually left Pergamon in 162 CE to pursue a career in Rome. In Rome, he gave a number of public anatomical demonstrations using pigs, monkeys, sheep, and goats. Although Hellenistic physicians had been doing human dissections in private, the Romans did not - either in private or public. Despite the outrage, Galen believed that the knowledge of anatomy was vital to a physician. He would only briefly leave Rome during a plague outbreak brought by troops returning from the East. While it may be convenient to blame the plague, he probably was driven out of the city by hostile conspirators.

 

Works

Galen wrote most of his life. His works comprise an estimated ten percent of all surviving Greek literature written before 350 CE. These works cover topics on medicine, philosophy, and linguistics. Many of these writings are listed in the two volumes entitled On His Own Books and On the Order of His Own Books. Among the best-known are:

• On the Art of Medicine
• Of the Atrabilis or Black Bile
• Is Blood Naturally Contained in the Arteries
• On the Elements According to Hippocrates
• The Best Doctor is also a Philosopher
• On Anatomical Procedures
• On Good and Bad Humours
• Of the Method of Curing Diseases
• On the Powers and Mixtures of Simple Remedies
• A Concise Treatment on the Pulse

 

Legacy

For over 1500 years after his death, Galen’s treatises were read and studied throughout Europe. The physician, philosopher, and author had studied those who had preceded him: Herophilus, Erasistratus and most of all the great Greek Hippocrates. He embraced their work especially that of Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, who first studied the causes of disease. Centuries later, Galen adopted his concept of the four humours: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. This notion, of course, would be disproven during the Age of Science with the work of such people as Vesalius and Harvey. And, like many of his predecessor, Galen believed that every physician, for the benefit of his patients and the human race, find out everything that he can about the human body. And, for this reason, he conducted numerous dissections - at first on animals but later on cadavers. It was these studies that caused him to agree with Plato’s assessment that the brain, not the heart, was responsible for human emotion, speech, and intellect. His studies of the nervous, heart and circulatory systems, although flawed, had surpassed anything previously known. While his skills as a physician brought him to the attention of the Roman emperors, they also brought the ire of his peers - possibly causing him to leave Rome and return home for a few years.

 

Anatomical And Medical Studies

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.

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.

Influence

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 CE 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.