Galen and Galenism

Abstract

A physician born in 129 in Pergamum (Asia Minor) and educated in Smyrna and Alexandria, Galen started his career as a physician to the gladiators in Pergamum until he was called to Italy by the co-emperors in 168. He then spent most of his career in Rome, taking care of the imperial court and also treating other patients, and died sometime around 216. Thanks to his position, he could devote himself to research and writing, producing an all-encompassing oeuvre in addition to assembling a vast library collection. Attracted to philosophy in his early years, he never lost this interest and built a robust medical system that combined accurate observation of facts with rigorous rational analysis. The influence of his oeuvre, identified as Galenism, was enormous. Whereas his treatises were differently transmitted in Byzantium, several were translated into Syriac in the sixth century CE and into Arabic in the ninth century. Many such Arabic versions and the original works that they generated were translated into Latin in the West from the late eleventh century on, and they gave a new impulse to medicine in the fourteenth century. In the Renaissance, the Galenic oeuvre went through three successive phases: the reappropriation of Galen’s method, the recovery of his text in the original language, and the critical analysis of Galen’s data. At the end of the sixteenth century, Galenism arrived to an end, leaving the field of medicine open to a revival of Hippocratism.