Galen

Galen of Pergamon was a Greek physician whose anatomical, physiological and medical writings dominated Western medicine for over thirteen hundred years. At twenty-eight he became physician to the gladiators of the High Priest of Asia, a post in which only five of his patients died compared to sixty under his predecessor, and he later served as physician to the Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius, Commodus and Septimius Severus. Because human dissection was largely forbidden in his time, his anatomical descriptions were based chiefly on dissecting Barbary macaques and other animals, which he judged structurally closest to humans, an assumption that introduced systematic errors later corrected by Andreas Vesalius. This atlas records what the historical record supports and is not medical advice.