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.

Galen of Pergamon was born in 129 in the prosperous Greek city of Pergamon in Roman Asia Minor, the son of the architect Aelius Nicon. He was educated in philosophy before turning to medicine at sixteen on the advice of a dream sent to his father, studied at Smyrna, Corinth, and above all Alexandria, and from 157 served four years as surgeon to the gladiators of the high priest of Pergamon.

From 162 he made his career at Rome, where he became court physician to Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus, Commodus, and Septimius Severus. His enormous body of writings — well over a hundred surviving works in some two and a half million words of Greek, the largest surviving literary corpus from antiquity — covers anatomy, physiology, pathology, therapeutics, pharmacology, diet, hygiene, logic, and philosophy. The major works include On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, On the Use of the Parts, the great anatomical and physiological treatises, the methodological On the Affections and Errors of the Soul, and the autobiographical On My Own Books and On the Order of My Own Books.

Galen took the medical theory of the Hippocratic corpus, the anatomical work of the Alexandrians, and a Stoicized Platonist philosophy and unified them into a system that remained the framework of European, Byzantine, and Islamic medicine for the next fifteen hundred years. He died at Rome around 216 in the reign of Septimius Severus.