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.
Facts
Disputed
Death YearThe eleventh-century Suda lexicon places his death around 199 AD, but a passage in Galen's own treatises refers to events of 204 AD, and Arabic sources suggest he lived into the early third century; modern scholars including Vivian Nutton and Veronique Boudon-Millot favor a date around 216 AD. Birth YearBorn September 129 AD in Pergamon; his birth date is comparatively well fixed by his own writings. Connections
Associated With
Bloodletting, Treatments Galen systematized humoral theory and made bloodletting central to Greco-Roman medical practice.
Source The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of HumanityRoy Porter
Critiqued Here
Andreas Vesalius, Healers Test submission: whether the discovered-by relation type can express Vesalius correcting Galen's prior anatomical errors, or whether this needs a dedicated corrects-work-of relation type; treat as a vocabulary and modeling question either way.
Source WikipediaWikipedia contributors
Additional Source Andreas Vesalius (Wikipedia)
Specialist In
Galen's post as physician to gladiators and his advanced, if animal-derived, work on brain and eye surgery were surgical in nature, though his broader medical writing ranged far beyond surgery alone.
Source WikipediaWikipedia contributors
Additional Source Wikipedia: Medical specialty
In the Other Atlases
- Also in Geography Atlas: Ancient Rome, nationality there.
- Also in Science Atlas: Humorism, influenced this subject there.
Sources
1. Wikidata: Galen
- Wikidata Q8778, class allow-list match (w-wdresolver-0926)
- Wikidata P569 (w-bbfill-medicine3-0926)
View the Source2. Wikipedia
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity
Roy Porter, W. W. Norton and Company, 1997Associated With: Bloodletting
Wikipedia: Medical specialty
Andreas Vesalius (Wikipedia)
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Galen base his anatomy on animals instead of human bodies?
Roman law forbade human dissection in his day, so Galen worked mainly on primates and animals.
Roman law had prohibited the dissection of human cadavers since roughly 150 BCE, and by Galen's time human dissection and vivisection were strictly forbidden in the Roman Empire, even though they had been practiced in Alexandria in the third century BCE. Galen therefore dissected living and dead animals, mostly primates such as Barbary macaques, which he judged structurally closest to humans. Later, Andreas Vesalius showed that some of Galen's descriptions matched monkeys rather than people, one example being his demonstration that the interventricular septum of the heart was not permeable as Galen had taught.
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