Galen's anatomy, drawn largely from apes, ruled Western medicine for centuries
For more than 1,300 years, Western doctors learned the body largely through one physician from Pergamon. Galen worked when human dissection was banned across the Roman Empire, so his anatomy leaned mainly on Barbary apes. Correcting him took Ibn al-Nafis in the thirteenth century and Andreas Vesalius in 1543.
Galen was born in September 129 CE in Pergamon, today Bergama in Turkey. His father, Aelius Nicon, was a rich architect and builder who dabbled in philosophy, mathematics and astronomy, and gave his son a broad education. From 16, Galen spent four years as an attendant at the local asclepeion, a healing temple. When his father died in 148, the 19-year-old inherited enough money to travel, visiting places such as Smyrna, Corinth, Crete and Cyprus before studying at the medical school of Alexandria.
He reached Rome in 162 and won fame through public demonstrations, while his impatience with rival theories made enemies among local doctors; the philosopher Eudemus even warned him they might try poison. Galen later served as court physician, attending Marcus Aurelius and treating Commodus through much of that emperor's life. He witnessed the Antonine Plague, likely an early smallpox outbreak, which is also called the Plague of Galen; his descriptions are brief but enough to identify the disease.
His thinking rested on the theory of four humours, black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm, taken from the Hippocratic text On the Nature of Man. Human dissection had been practised in Alexandria in the third century BCE by Herophilus and Erasistratus, but by Galen's day Rome forbade it. His model of circulation stood until about 1242, when Ibn al-Nafis described pulmonary circulation. His anatomy held until Vesalius published De humani corporis fabrica, based on human dissections.
Galen considered himself a philosopher as much as a doctor and wrote a treatise arguing that the best physician is also a philosopher. His method of observation and dissection sat between the rationalist and empiricist medical schools of his time. Many works survive in Greek or in translation, others were lost, and some attributed to him are probably not his. His name means calm in Greek, and he was at least seventy at his death around 216.
Source: Galen
