Volume 22, Number 11 · June 26, 1975
The Dominant Doctor
By Jean Starobinski, Translated by Peter France
Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy
by Owsei Temkin
Cornell University Press, 240 pp., $15.00
Galen of Pergamum elaborated his medical philosophy during the second half of the second century AD, and was the dominant influence on medical thinking until the eighteenth. He was at the same time an experimental scientist, a medical practitioner, and a commentator. Before being doctor to the emperors in Rome, where he died, he was surgeon to the gladiators in his home town of Pergamum in Asia Minor. In his writings he speaks as the equal of Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle, praising and criticizing them by turns. If in many respects he was an epigone who selected from the immense heritage of his predecessors, he nevertheless codified their wisdom for succeeding generations, making considerable improvements in their views of anatomy and physiology.
Review, 3901 words
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