Galen - Life

Greek physician, born in Pergamum, Mysia. He studied medicine at Pergamum, Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria, and later lived in Rome. He wrote at length on medical and philosophical subjects, and gathered up all the medical knowledge of his time, thus becoming the authority used by subsequent Greek and Roman medical writers.

Greek: Γαληνός, Latin: Claudius Galenus of Pergamum (129 – 200 AD), better known in English as Galen, was an ancient Greek physician. Galen's views dominated European medicine for over a thousand years.

Life

Galen was born in Pergamum (modern-day Bergama, Turkey), the son of Nicon, a wealthy architect.

By the age of twenty he had become a therapeutes ("attendant" or "associate") of the god Asclepius in the local temple for four years. After his father's death in 148 or 149, he left to study abroad in Smyrna, Corinth and Alexandria over a period of twelve years. When he returned to Pergamum in 157, he worked as a physician in a gladiator school for three or four years.

Galen performed many audacious operations that were not again used for almost two millennia, including brain and eye surgery. To perform cataract surgery, Galen would insert a long needle-like instrument into the eye behind the lens. Galen had set the standard for modern medicine in many different ways.

In 162, he moved to Rome where he wrote extensively, lectured and publicly demonstrated his knowledge of anatomy. One of them was the consul Flavius Boethius who introduced him to the Imperial court where he became a court physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Reputedly, he spoke mostly Greek, which in the field of medicine was a more highly respected language than Latin at the time.

Galen spent the rest of his life in the Imperial court, writing and experimenting. His exact date of death has traditionally been placed around the year 200, based on a reference from the 10th century Suda Lexicon.