Galen 129 AD – c. 216 AD

Aelius Galenus, known as Galen of Pergamon, was a Greek physician, surgeon, and philosopher of the Roman Empire and the most influential medical author of antiquity. Trained in the great medical schools of the eastern Mediterranean, he served as physician to the gladiators of Pergamon before becoming court physician to the emperors Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, and Septimius Severus. His enormous body of writings consolidated Hippocratic medicine within an Aristotelian and Stoic philosophical framework, and his works on anatomy, physiology, and the relation of body and soul shaped medieval Islamic and Latin medicine for over a thousand years. He insisted that the best physician must also be a philosopher.