therefore the ancient art of trying to achieve a balance in humors, and
explains why so many patients were bled (often, to death). Consider all the
times you have been sick with a fever. That fever, a bodily increase in
temperature, is a systemic reaction to a bacterial or viral attack that is now
easy to explain in scientific terms. Had you lived a mere five generations
ago, you likely would have been bled bedside by your community
physician.
The Roman Empire began in 31 B.C.E., with the consolidation of Greece
and Hellenistic Egypt under one ruler, Augustus Caesar. Augustus ruled
until 14 B.C.E., and Rome was the center of a powerful, peaceful kingdom
for two hundred years. Greek city-states assimilated under Roman rule,
and in turn, the Early Empire embraced classical Greek culture.
Into this period of relative peace and order was born the other great
physician of antiquity, Galen (130–200 C.E.). Like Hippocrates, Galen was
from east of the Aegean Sea, and was born in Pergamum in Asia Minor
(present day Bergama, Turkey). Like Hippocrates’s island of birth (Kos),
Pergamum was home to a sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius. Galen’s
training started at home, extended to Smyrna and Corinth, and ended at
Alexandria. Owsei Temkin has written: “The founding of Alexandria was
an important event in the history of ancient scholarship, science, and
medicine. From the 3rd century B.C.E. until its conquest by the Arabs in
642 C.E., Alexandria was the foremost center of medical study and
especially of anatomy.” As will become plain in this book, there has
always been a “center of scientific and medical learning” in the world.
“For a time, it seems, anatomy could be studied on human bodies, until
Roman law put an end to such study and confined anatomy to animal
dissection.”^12
Galen returned to Pergamum, flush with his Alexandrian education,
where he became physician to the gladiators. An early “sports medicine
physician,” it has become clear that Galen probably performed no human
dissection during his career, but he was exposed to deep anatomy during
his surgical treatment of gladiatorial injuries. Galen was later summoned
to Rome by the emperor Marcus Aurelius, and it seems that he spent his
last forty years there, writing, teaching, and attending to the emperor.
Galen was not just an influential physician. He was a philosopher, a
dazzling and highly industrious author who wrote in a cultivated Greek
style, a scientist and skilled dissector (albeit, of monkeys and pigs).