Galen

NAME Galen of Pergamon

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Galen was the most renowned physician in ancient Rome. He wrote around 100 medical textbooks and established ideas that shaped Western medicine for over a millennium.

BIRTH Galen was born in September 129 AD in Pergamon (modern-day Bergama, Turkey), a wealthy Greek city in the Roman province of Asia Minor. Some sources suggest he was born in 131 AD during the reign of Emperor Hadrian.

FAMILY BACKGROUND Galen was born into the intellectual and social elite of Pergamon. His father was Aelius Nicon, a wealthy Greek architect, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher with scholarly interests. Nicon was described by Galen as "highly amiable, just, good and benevolent". His grandfather and great-grandfather had also been architects. 

Galen's mother, in contrast, was described as hot-tempered and prone to anger, constantly arguing with his father. Galen compared her unfavorably to Socrates' wife Xanthippe, noting that she "bit her handmaids" and "constantly shrieked" at his father.

CHILDHOOD Galen's childhood was shaped by his father's intellectual influence and his family's privileged position in Pergamon society. His father Nicon closely supervised his education and tutored him at home. The family possessed considerable fortune, allowing Galen access to the finest education available. When Galen was around sixteen or seventeen years old, his father had a dream in which the god Asclepius told him to allow his son to study medicine rather than philosophy or politics.

EDUCATION Galen received a comprehensive liberal education before focusing on medicine. He first studied rhetoric and philosophy, examining the works of the Stoics, Platonists, Epicureans, and Peripatetics. At age 16, he began studying medicine at the prestigious Asclepion (healing temple) in Pergamon for four years. 

When his father died in 148-149 AD, leaving him independently wealthy at age 19, Galen traveled extensively to further his medical education. He studied in Smyrna, Corinth, Crete, Cilicia, Cyprus, and Alexandria. Alexandria was considered the greatest medical center of the ancient world, where he studied anatomical science and physiological theory. His education lasted an unusually long 12 years, making him unique among Greek and Roman physicians.

CAREER RECORD 157 AD, at age 28, Galen returned to Pergamum and became physician to the gladiators of the High Priest of Asia.

162 AD, at age 33, Galen moved to Rome to practice medicine and quickly gained prominence.

166 AD, Galen left Rome, likely due to an impending plague, and returned to Pergamum.

168 AD, Galen was appointed physician to Commodus, the son of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, giving him access to Rome's elite and a platform to write prolifically on medicine. 

168–169 AD, Galen was called by Emperors Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius to join a military campaign in northern Italy as their physician.

191 AD, at age 62, a major fire in the Temple of Peace in Rome destroyed many of Galen’s works and possessions.

198 AD, at age 69, Galen became physician to Emperor Septimius Severus

APPEARANCE While there are no definitive contemporary portraits or detailed physical descriptions of Galen, he is generally depicted in later artistic representations as a distinguished figure, often with a beard, reflecting the philosophical and learned persona of the time.

Galen dissecting a monkey, as imagined by Veloso Salgado in 1906

FASHION As a prominent physician and intellectual in Roman society, Galen would have dressed in  toga-like garments or tunics typical of the Roman elite

CHARACTER Galen was known for his enormous ego and arrogance. He was described as a master self-promoter and braggart who made many enemies among his physician colleagues in Rome. Despite this, he was also recognized as highly ethical, brilliant, and devoted to truth. Galen emphasized that true physicians should practice medicine for the good of humanity rather than for money. He was extremely ambitious and competitive, often engaging in public medical debates and demonstrations.

SPEAKING VOICE Galen was renowned for his rhetorical skills and displayed exceptional abilities in public debates. He was described as a skilled communicator who could adjust his speaking style and arguments to different audiences. His rhetorical training made him "formidable to his opponents" in medical and philosophical discussions. (1)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Galen was renowned for his biting wit and satirical style when criticizing his professional rivals. One notable example comes from his polemics against the followers of Erasistratus, a rival anatomist. Galen lampooned their ignorance using evocative language drawn from Greek comedy, ridiculing their lack of anatomical understanding by comparing their errors to the absurdities found in Menander’s plays. This erudite satire allowed him to mock their mistakes in both a learned and entertaining way. (2)

RELATIONSHIPS Galen's most significant professional relationships were with his mentors during his education and later with his imperial patrons, particularly Marcus Aurelius. He also had numerous professional rivalries, which he often expressed quite vociferously in his writings. 

There is no mention in his writings of siblings, a wife, lovers, or children.

MONEY AND FAME Galen inherited considerable wealth from his father and became independently wealthy at age 19. He claimed to practice medicine without charging fees, instead accepting occasional gifts. One notable payment was 400 gold coins (40,000 sesterces) for treating a consul's wife, which he described as a reward rather than a fee. He criticized other physicians for being motivated by greed rather than humanitarian purposes. 

By the time of his death, he was a household name across the Roman Empire.

FOOD AND DRINK Galen believed that good health began not in the physician’s office but at the dining table. He championed the idea that diet and lifestyle were essential pillars of medicine, and his writings are filled with lively commentary on the properties of food and drink. For Galen, eating wasn’t just about satisfying hunger — it was about replacing lost body matter and fueling the vital forces of the human body.

He took a deeply philosophical — and occasionally peculiar — approach to nutrition. The most beneficial foods, he argued, were those that bore a "similarity" to human flesh. In other words, the closer something was to the body in nature, the better it was for the body in function. Based on this logic, pork, red mullet (a kind of fish), and lettuce earned top marks from Galen's culinary checklist.

He rated cereals, beans, pulses, and meat as the most nutritious — the building blocks of strength and vitality — while vegetables and fruits were considered little more than dietary filler, lacking the substance needed for true nourishment. His recommendations were always tailored to an individual’s "constitution," meaning their unique blend of humors, temperament, and physical condition.

Although his preferences skewed toward the theoretical, Galen would have eaten much like a well-to-do Roman: a diet centered on grains (like barley and spelt), occasional meats, fruits, and vegetables, with wine as the standard drink, often diluted and served with meals.

He also wrote extensively on herbal remedies and the medicinal effects of food, treating the kitchen and the apothecary as overlapping realms. In Galen’s world, a well-seasoned stew might just be as important as a well-timed dose of medicine.

MUSIC AND ARTS Galen saw music not merely as entertainment, but as a powerful force for healing. As a man of wide learning, he placed music firmly within the liberal arts, believing it had the ability to shape a person’s health and emotional well-being. In his writings, he recommended music — along with other artistic pursuits — as an integral part of holistic care, recognizing the deep connection between the mind (or soul) and the body.

For Galen, a truly capable physician needed more than anatomical knowledge; they should also be culturally literate, attuned to the emotional and spiritual dimensions of their patients. Music, with its ability to soothe, uplift, or rebalance the soul, was a kind of medicine for the psyche — just as vital as diet or drugs.

His ideas helped plant the seeds for a long-standing belief in Western medicine: that music could restore harmony between the soul and the body. This view endured well beyond Galen’s time, echoing through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when music was still prescribed as a remedy for melancholia and spiritual unrest.

LITERATURE Galen was one of the most prolific writers of antiquity, By the time he was done scribbling (or more likely dictating to a poor assistant with cramp in his writing hand), he had produced a body of work that makes most ancient authors look like part-time bloggers. What survives of his writing today adds up to over 2.6 million words, which is about one-eighth of all classical Greek literature still in existence. Just imagine the poor translator who had to sort through it all.

The most heroic attempt to corral this tidal wave of words came courtesy of a 19th-century German scholar named Karl Gottlob Kühn, who compiled 122 treatises across 22 volumes — over 20,000 pages in total — presumably without once pausing to ask if Galen had perhaps said enough already.

But Galen wasn’t just a medical man with a gift for verbosity. He wrote with purpose and astonishing range. His works covered everything from anatomy and drug preparation to ethics, psychology, and logic. At times, he even wandered into the swampier corners of philosophy, determined to make sense of Hippocrates, Plato, and the tangled minds of the ancient world.

If you could name it, Galen probably wrote about it — and if you couldn’t name it, he probably invented a term for it and wrote about that, too. 

Image by Gemini

His favourite subjects included:

Anatomy and Physiology: On Anatomical Procedures, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body — cheerily filled with details gleaned from dissecting monkeys, pigs, and the occasional goat.

Therapeutics and Medicine: Method of Medicine, Therapeutics to Glaucon — the latter sounding suspiciously like a self-help guide for anxious Stoics.

Pharmacology: On the Powers of Simple Drugs, On Theriac to Piso — theriac being a mythical, multi-ingredient antidote, not a Roman dessert.

Philosophy and Logic: On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, On the Natural Faculties — medical thought with a side of metaphysics.

Psychology and Ethics: On the Passions and Errors of the Soul — a sort of ancient prequel to Freud, minus the couch.

Commentaries on Hippocrates: because Galen never met an ancient authority he couldn’t annotate at great length.

Among his greatest hits (if ancient textbooks can be called that), a few stand out:

On the Natural Faculties — A guided tour of your innards, written with astonishing confidence and only mild accuracy.

Method of Medicine — Galen’s medical magnum opus, with advice on everything from headaches to heartburn.

On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body — Part anatomical textbook, part love letter to the human spleen.

On the Powers of Simple Drugs — A pharmacological goldmine, if your medicine cabinet happens to include opium, myrrh, and bits of badger.

On the Passions and Errors of the Soul — Galen dips a toe into early psychology and finds, unsurprisingly, that people are a mess.

Most of Galen’s original works were written in Greek, though many survive only in Arabic or Latin translations, as the original scrolls were lost to fires, decay, and the general indifference of history. Ironically, Galen’s influence became even more widespread after his death, thanks to Islamic scholars who preserved and expanded upon his ideas. By the time medieval Europe caught up, Galen was less a historical figure than a medical deity — quoted, revered, and rarely questioned.

Kühn’s edition (1821–1833) is still the most complete, although navigating it requires both fluency in Latin and exceptional stamina.

Modern projects like the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum and the Cambridge Galen Translations are making Galen digestible for non-masochists.

If you're feeling adventurous, you can find digital versions in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae or tucked away in obscure corners of the French Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé.

Given the sheer volume of material, modern scholars have tried to corral Galen’s work into broad categories:

Physiology – how the body functions (or, in Galen’s case, how it probably does)

Hygiene – how not to die from filth

Etiology – what causes disease (spoiler: often bad humors)

Semeiotics – reading signs and symptoms, like a mystical GP

Pharmacy – making medicines out of everything from herbs to hedgehog bits

Bloodletting – lots of opinions, very few actual veins consulted

Therapeutics – treatment plans with equal parts logic and leeches

Aphorisms and Spurious Works – the “miscellaneous drawer” of Galenic thought

For over a thousand years, Galen’s words were medical gospel. His name was invoked by medieval doctors, Islamic physicians, Renaissance scholars, and anyone else who needed an ancient source to justify bleeding someone with a fever. His blend of theory, observation, and sheer confidence kept him atop the medical hierarchy until the likes of Vesalius and Harvey came along and spoiled the party by dissecting actual humans.

Even so, Galen’s voice echoes across time — learned, loquacious, and completely convinced that he was right. And for centuries, no one dared disagree.

NATURE Galen spent considerable time studying natural phenomena, particularly in relation to medicine and anatomy. He traveled to various locations to collect medicinal plants and observe natural remedies. His estate in Campania provided him with a retreat from urban Rome.

Galen's understanding of the human body was largely based on the dissection of animals (monkeys, pigs, goats, etc.), as human dissection was restricted. 

PETS Galen's focus was primarily on animals for anatomical study and observation, rather than companionship.

No information about Galen keeping pets survives in historical records. However, he extensively used animals for anatomical research and experimentation.

HOBBIES AND SPORTS His primary "hobby" would have been intellectual inquiry, reading, writing, and conducting anatomical demonstrations.

While Galen's life was dominated by his medical and philosophical pursuits, his early experience as a physician to gladiators indicates an exposure to sports and physical combat. His writings also touch upon exercise and its importance for health.

MEDICAL CAREER Galen was born in 129 AD in the bustling ancient city of Pergamum, now part of modern-day Turkey and back then one of those rare places where you could buy a good amphora, get stitched up by a surgeon, and borrow a book from a major library all in the same afternoon. He began his studies in philosophy (as many did, including those with no practical intentions whatsoever), but sensibly switched to medicine at 16, perhaps upon realizing that sick people paid better than philosophers.

He eventually made his way to Alexandria, the Oxford or Harvard of ancient medical schools, where you could learn anything from spleen function to mummification techniques, often from the same tutor. There, Galen soaked up all the best theories of the day like a sponge with a scroll fetish.

Then came a job that really put Galen’s name on the surgical map: physician to the gladiators of Pergamum — which was essentially like being the team doctor for a professional sports franchise where people regularly lost limbs. At just 28 or 29, he found himself elbow-deep in trauma medicine, treating sword wounds, fractured bones, and the occasional spear to the thigh. His idea to soak dressings in wine to clean wounds was nothing short of revolutionary and may also have been secretly appreciated by the patients.

It was here that Galen developed his habit of careful observation — largely because not paying attention could get your patient killed, and you fired.

In the early 160s AD, Galen relocated to Rome, which was essentially the Manhattan of the ancient world — noisy, chaotic, full of status-seeking clients, and an ideal place to become someone. And become someone he did. Galen quickly rose through the ranks by performing flashy public anatomical demonstrations and dazzling wealthy Romans with his diagnostic prowess.

Eventually, he landed the ultimate gig: personal physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius — the philosopher-king who spent his spare time meditating and swatting away Germanic tribes. Galen also served Commodus, who preferred wrestling to wisdom, and Septimius Severus, who had the temperament of a lion in a toga. Somehow, Galen outlasted them all.

Galen was obsessed with anatomy, which he considered the bedrock of all medical knowledge. Since Roman law frowned upon slicing open actual humans (tiresome legalism), he turned instead to Barbary apes, pigs, and goats, who were somewhat less litigious.

Among his many discoveries:

He distinguished seven pairs of cranial nerves,

Described heart valves (which nobody had bothered with before),

Demonstrated that arteries carry blood, not air (a stunning revelation at the time),

Explained the difference between veins and arteries,

And proved that urine comes from the kidneys, not the bladder (which makes you wonder what everyone else had been thinking).

He even snipped the recurrent laryngeal nerve in one unlucky animal just to show the brain controlled the voice. This sort of grisly curiosity became his hallmark.

What made Galen truly exceptional wasn’t just his stamina or surgical flair, but his insistence on experiment and observation. He didn’t just accept what the ancients said — he tested it, which was virtually unheard of at the time. He believed medicine should be based on evidence, not hunches or dusty quotations, and that ethics and professionalism were just as essential as scalpels and ointments.

Galen also wrote. And wrote. And wrote. He churned out hundreds of treatises, producing a literary output so vast it makes most modern academics look like they’ve been slacking. His work covered everything from drug recipes to philosophical musings, and he had the rare gift of combining the best of Greek medical thinking with his own hard-won discoveries.

So comprehensive was his output that, for the next 1,300 years, if you wanted to become a doctor in Europe or the Islamic world, you effectively had to read Galen first — preferably all of him, ideally twice. Even when he was wrong (and he often was), he was still considered more reliable than the evidence of one's own eyes.

Galen set the template for what a physician could be: part scientist, part philosopher, part craftsman. He believed the body and soul were deeply connected, that health required harmony, and that a good doctor should be as comfortable discussing ethics as he was diagnosing a rash.

Yes, many of his anatomical claims were later corrected — turns out pigs aren’t quite perfect substitutes for people — but his insistence on experimentation, logical reasoning, and intellectual rigor paved the way for the eventual emergence of modern medical science.

In short, Galen didn’t just practice medicine. He defined it — and for over a thousand years, everyone else simply tried to catch up.

SCIENCE AND MATHS One of the most remarkable things about Galen — and there are many — is that he actually experimented. In an age when most physicians were content to quote Aristotle and wave herbs around, Galen cut things open, poked around, and took notes. He’s widely credited as the originator of the experimental method in medicine, which is quite an achievement for someone who did most of his work with monkeys, pigs, and the occasional goat rather than human bodies.

He famously proved that arteries carry blood, not air, which, considering that the Greeks had believed otherwise for centuries, was a rather major course correction. He also snipped nerves and watched what happened, which sounds a bit cruel by modern standards, but was revolutionary in understanding how the body worked. These early neurological experiments helped establish the link between the brain, spinal cord, and movement.

Galen’s flair for inquiry may well have come from his father, Nicon, a mathematician and astronomer who filled his son’s head with geometry and logical structure before Galen ever saw a cadaver. The result was a physician who approached medicine with the tidy mindset of a surveyor — measuring, dissecting, categorizing, and (when necessary) cauterizing.

He was also one of the first to quantify the effects of drugs, attempting to determine how much of a given substance would heal, how much would harm, and how much would simply taste awful. In an era dominated by theory and guesswork, Galen brought something refreshingly rare to medicine: evidence.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Galen was not just a man of scalpels and salves — he was also a deeply committed philosopher. He studied under multiple philosophical schools, including Stoicism, Platonism, Epicureanism, and Peripateticism, absorbing ideas like a sponge in a scroll shop. Of these, he felt the strongest affinity with the Peripatetics, especially the teachings of Aristotle, whose methodical approach to knowledge mirrored Galen’s own.

Though he lived in the heart of the pagan Roman Empire, Galen held a personal belief in monotheism, which was both unusual for his time and enormously convenient centuries later. This belief made his work far more palatable to early Christian scholars, who eagerly adopted much of his thinking, especially his views on divine design in nature.

Galen wrote extensively on logic, ethics, and moral philosophy, and his approach was refreshingly syncretic. Rather than swearing loyalty to a single school of thought, he cherry-picked the best ideas from each, blending them into a practical philosophy that served his broader medical worldview. For Galen, truth wasn’t about dogma — it was about what worked, what could be reasoned through, and above all, what could help heal.

POLITICS Galen served as personal physician to multiple Roman emperors, including Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, and Septimius Severus. However, he generally avoided direct political involvement, focusing on his medical and intellectual pursuits. His position gave him access to the highest levels of Roman society without requiring active political participation.

SCANDAL Galen's arrogance and success created significant envy and hostility among his medical colleagues in Rome. Rivals accused him of using magic rather than science in his medical practice, which he vigorously defended against. 

His cures were sometimes extreme. He recommended amputating the uvula to treat a cough and boring holes in the skull to relieve headaches. He also used pigeon’s blood to dress wounds — not scandalous then, but eyebrow-raising now.

MILITARY RECORD  His experience treating gladiators, however, provided him with extensive practical knowledge of trauma and wounds, akin to a military surgeon's experience, without being a soldier himself.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS As a physician, Galen emphasized the importance of maintaining health through proper diet, exercise, and lifestyle choices. He undoubtedly applied these principles to his own life. His prolific output and longevity (living into his 70s, a respectable age for the time) suggest he generally enjoyed good health, despite periods of plague that affected Rome.

HOMES Galen maintained residences in Pergamon and later, for most of his adult life, in Rome. His Roman home would have been commensurate with his status as a wealthy and influential physician, likely a substantial domus.

He owned a country estate in Campania, which he visited for extended periods. 

His home and manuscripts were destroyed in the great fire of Rome of 192AD, an event that left him emotionally shaken and became the subject of his rediscovered work On the Avoidance of Distress.

TRAVEL Galen traveled extensively during his formative years for his medical education, visiting Smyrna, Corinth, and particularly Alexandria. These journeys were crucial for his development, allowing him to learn from different masters and observe various medical practices. He also traveled between Pergamon and Rome at different points in his career.

DEATH Galen's exact date of death is disputed. Traditional sources suggest he died around 199-201 AD at age 70, but more recent scholarship indicates he likely lived until at least 216 AD during the reign of Emperor Caracalla. Byzantine and Arab sources from the sixth century onwards suggest he died in Caracalla's reign. He probably lived to at least age 80, making him exceptionally long-lived for his era.

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA  Galen has been depicted or referenced in various forms of media, particularly in historical documentaries, educational programs about ancient medicine, and sometimes in historical fiction set in the Roman Empire.

His legacy is referenced in medical schools and pharmaceutical contexts, where herbal medicines are still called "galenicals". 

ACHIEVEMENTS Appointed physician to the imperial family

Wrote more than 100 medical treatises, many of which shaped Western medicine for centuries

Disproved the Greek theory that arteries carried air

Developed early theories of psychosomatic illness

Revived and preserved much of classical Greek medical theory

One of the most dominant medical authorities in history — for better and for worse

Sources (1)  Open Edition Books (2) Bryn Mawr Classical Review