Galen

Abstract

After his early studies in Pergamum, where he was born in 129, Galen trained with the best physicians and philosophers in Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria before returning to his hometown, where he served as physician to the gladiators. Building on his early medical successes, particularly with the treatment of wounds (reflecting his excellent anatomical knowledge), he moved to Rome, where he treated some of the most influential citizens of his time, including the emperor Marcus Aurelius himself. His medical corpus, written entirely in Greek, including many commentaries on a vast number of Hippocratic treatises, was by far the most significant in antiquity in terms of both the mass of accumulated knowledge and the range of subjects covered: anatomy, physiology, therapeutics, hygiene, nosology, sphygmology, and pharmacology, but also philosophy, ethics, and lexicology.