A little bit wrong, a little bit right
BY RONDA ADDY

Claudius Galenus of Pergamum, or Galen as he is known in English, was a Greek anatomist, physician and writer whose theories formed the basis of medicine in Europe until the Renaissance. In the development of medicine, he is second only to Hippocrates of Cos. He performed extensive vivisections and dissections on animals, and even though human dissections were frowned upon, he occasionally performed those as well and encouraged his students to do so, too.

Galen was born in Pergamum (modern-day Bergama, Turkey) around 139 A.D. to wealthy Greek parents. While growing up, Galen dabbled in many interests, including astronomy, philosophy, architecture and agriculture, before choosing medicine. By age 20, Galen had become a therapeutes (attendant) in the local temple of Asclepius, a Greek hero who became the god of medicine and healing. He stayed there for four years.

After the death of his father around 148 A.D., Galen went to Smyrna, Corinth and Alexandria, where he studied for 12 years. He then returned home to work as a doctor in a Pergamum arena, where he would remain for four years. Through the gladiator's wounds, Galen gained knowledge into the "windows of the body." The wounds sustained by the gladiators were as close to human vivisection as he could get and Galen was able to view parts of the internal human body most people never got to see. According to Galen, none of the gladiators under his care died.

Galen's work at Pergamum brought him to the attention of the highest circles, and at 32, he decided to move to Rome. There, he served as the resident surgeon at the Colosseum until becoming the personal physician to emperor Marcus Aureluis. Aurelius wanted to move the public's thinking away from superstition and encouraged Galen to give public lectures and anatomical demonstrations using animals. Galen took the approach one step further by turning to medical writing, penning as many as 600 books dealing with every aspect of medicine at the time.

Although Galen's fear of assassination eventually forced him to leave Rome, he was responsible for performing operations that wouldn't be done again for hundreds of years. He performed cataract surgery by inserting a long needle into the eye behind the lens and pulling back the eye ever so slightly to remove the cataract. His studies of the brain were among the first done in earnest. He came to the conclusion that the brain was central to sensation by observing stroke victims who lost certain senses even though their sensory organs remained intact. Through his animal experiements, he observed how doing certain things could make an animal numb or put it into a deep trance.

Galen also noticed there were empty spaces in the brain that he believed contained something like air. He believed there was a special connection between these empty spaces and the soul. These gaseous substances were inhaled from the cosmos, thereby serving as a link between the soul and the body. He called these ventricle vapors "spiritus animalis" or "animal spirt." For centuries, this concept was believed to be true.

When a fire destroyed the Temple of Peace in 191 A.D., only 20 of Galen's 600 books were saved by Arab physicians. Galen's work was then translated into Arabic on an impressive scale. It wasn't until the late Middle Ages that Galen's work on anatomy would reach the Western world.

The date of Galen's death remains in question, with some placing it between 199 and 200 A.D. and others placing it around 216 A.D. His contributions to the field of medicine, on the other hand, have never been in question and are quite profound. He was considered one of the first experimental physiologists because of his work on kidney functions and the spinal cord. He also introduced several pharmaceutical drugs, like using willow bark (laudanum) as an anesthetic.