Galen Quotes on Knowledge
Galen of Pergamon (c. 129 – c. 216 AD) — the most influential physician in the Western tradition before the early modern period — defended an explicitly philosophical conception of medical knowledge in That the Best Physician is Also a Philosopher and across the great anatomical and methodological treatises. The Galenic synthesis combined the empirical observation of the Hippocratic corpus with the demonstrative ideal of Aristotelian science, holding that the physician must possess both clinical experience and the logical training necessary to reason from observed phenomena to their underlying causes. The framework dominated medical epistemology in Latin, Arabic, and Greek for almost fifteen centuries.
Quotes
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“The best physician is also a philosopher.”
Quod optimus medicus sit quoque philosophus. -
Attributed to Galen:
“He cures most successfully who is most trusted.”
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Attributed to Galen:
“Medicine without philosophy is blind, philosophy without medicine empty.”
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“Diogenes received an invitation to dine with one whose house was splendidly furnished, in the highest order and taste, and nothing therein wanting. Diogenes, hawking, and as if about to spit, looked in all directions, and finding nothing adapted thereto, spat right in the face of the master. He, indignant, asked why he did so? "Because," Diogenes, "I saw nothing so dirty and filthy in all your hou”
Galen, Exhortation to Study the Arts , Coxe (1846), p. 479; cf. Diogenes Laërtius , vi. 32. -
“Diogenes the Cynic , it is related, was mighty of all people in regard to everything from self-control to endurance. He indulged in sexual lusts, not associating it with pleasure , an attractive good thing to some, but because of the harm that the retention of semen would cause if he avoided the habit of releasing it. When a prostitute who promised to visit him was delayed for some time, he rubbed”
Galen, On the Affected Parts , Alard (1813), p. 104. -
“Galen, On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, : PHP III 8.35.1-11 translation: De Lacy, Phillip (1978- 1984) Galen, On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, Berlin. p. 233; cited in: Christopher Jon Elliott. "Galen, Rome and the Second Sophistic." p. 147-8.”
It would be better, I think, for the man who really seeks the truth not to ask what the poets say; rather, he should first learn the method of finding the scientific premises that I discussed in the second book; then he should train and exercise himself in this method; and when his training is sufficiently advanced, then, as he approaches each particular problem, he should enquire into the premise -
“But it is best of all to look at the human skeleton with your own eyes.”
Galen, On Anatomical Procedures , Bk. 1, Ch. 2; as translated by Charles Singer in Galen on Anatomical Procedures (1956), p. 2. -
“The fact is that those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge , but they will not even stop to learn!”
Galen, On the Natural Faculties , Bk. 1, sect. 13; cited from Arthur John Brock (trans.) On the Natural Faculties (London: Heinemann, 1963) p. 57. -
“That which is , grows, while that which is not , becomes.”
Galen, On the Natural Faculties , Bk. 2, sect. 3; cited from Arthur John Brock (trans.) On the Natural Faculties (London: Heinemann, 1963) p. 139.