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Galen On the natural faculties

by Galen, Arthur John Brock, Paul Boer

If the work of Hippocrates be taken as representing the foundation upon which the edifice of historical Greek medicine was reared, then the work of GALEN, who lived some six hundred years later, may be looked upon as the summit of the same edifice. He was born in Pergamum A.D. 129, and both there and in other academic centres of the Aegean pursued his medical studies before being appointed physicial to the Pergamene gladiators in 157. Becoming dissatisfied with this type of practice he emigrated to Rome, where he soon won acknowledgement as the foremost medical authority of his time and where, with one brief interruption, he remained until his death in 199. His writings were so numerous and his reputation so influential that he was obliged to furnish his disciples with two handbooks, still extant, On the order of my writings and On my genuine works. Though the standard edition (by C.G. Kühn, 1821-33) runs to twenty-two volumes, On the Natural Faculties is still the only medical treatise of his available in English. Galen's merit is to have crystallised or brought to focus all the best work of the Greek medical schools which had preceded his own time. It is essentially in the form of Galenism that Greek medicine was transmitted to after ages. -- JACKET.