Late antiquity ; Galen is depicted top center. In his time, Galen's reputation as both physician and philosopher was legendary, the emperor Marcus Aurelius describing him as "Primum sane medicorum esse, philosophorum autem solum" (first among doctors and unique among philosophers
Praen 14: 660). Other contemporary authors in the Greek world confirm this including
Theodotus the Shoemaker,
Athenaeus and
Alexander of Aphrodisias. The 7th-century poet
George of Pisida went so far as to refer to Christ as a second and neglected Galen. Galen continued to exert an important influence over the theory and practice of medicine until the mid-17th century in the Byzantine and Arabic worlds and Europe. A few centuries after Galen,
Palladius Iatrosophista stated in his commentary on Hippocrates that Hippocrates sowed and Galen reaped. Galen summarized and synthesized the work of his predecessors, and it is in Galen's words (Galenism) that Greek medicine was handed down to subsequent generations, such that Galenism became the means by which Greek medicine was known to the world. Often, this was in the form of restating and reinterpreting, such as in Magnus of Nisibis' 4th-century work on urine, which was in turn translated into Arabic. So strong was Galenism that other authors such as Hippocrates began to be seen through Galen's eyes, while his opponents became marginalised and other medical sects such as Asclepiadism slowly disappeared.
Medieval Islam '', 1225–1250, Syria. Vienna AF 10, Syria.
was allegedly based on the work of Galen. Here, Andromachus the Elder on horseback, questioning a patient who has received a snake bite. Kitab al-Dariyak'', 1198–1199, Syria. Galen's approach to medicine became and remains influential in the Islamic world. The first major translator of Galen into Arabic was the Arab Christian
Hunayn ibn Ishaq. He translated () 129 works of "Jalinos" into
Arabic. Arabic sources, such as
Muhammad ibn Zakarīya al-Rāzi (AD 865–925), continue to be the source of discovery of new or relatively inaccessible Galenic writings. the works of Galen were not accepted unquestioningly, but as a challengeable basis for further
inquiry. A strong emphasis on
experimentation and
empiricism led to new results and new observations, which were contrasted and combined with those of Galen by writers such as al-Rāzi,
Ali ibn Abbas al-Majusi,
Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi,
Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Zuhr, and Ibn al-Nafis. For example, Ibn al-Nafis' discovery of the
pulmonary circulation contradicted the Galenic theory on the heart. The influence of Galen's writings, including humorism, remains strong in modern
Unani medicine, now closely identified with Islamic culture, and widely practiced from India (where it is officially recognized) to Morocco.
Maimonides was influenced by Galen, whom he cited most often in his medical works, and whom he considered to be the greatest
physician of all time. In India many Hindu physicians studied Persian and Urdu languages and learnt Galenic medicine. This trend of studies among Hindu physicians began in the 17th century and lasted until the early 20th century (Speziale 2018).
Middle Ages From the 11th century onwards,
Latin translations of Islamic medical texts began to appear in the West, alongside the
Salerno school of thought, and were soon incorporated into the curriculum at the universities of
Naples and
Montpellier. From that time, Galenism took on a new, unquestioned authority, Galen even being referred to as the "Medical Pope of the Middle Ages". However, Galen's influence was so great that when dissections discovered anomalies compared with Galen's anatomy, the physicians often tried to fit these into the Galenic system. An example of this is
Mondino de Liuzzi, who describes rudimentary blood circulation in his writings but still asserts that the left ventricle should contain air. Some cited these changes as proof that human anatomy had changed since the time of Galen. The most important translator of Galen's works into Latin was Niccolò di Deoprepio da Reggio, who spent several years working on Galen. Niccolò worked at the Angevin Court during the reign of king
Robert of Naples. Among Niccolò's translations is a piece from a medical treatise by Galen, of which the original text is lost.
Renaissance The first edition of Galen's complete works in Latin translation was edited by Diomede Bonardo of Brescia and printed at Venice by Filippo Pinzi in 1490. The Renaissance, and the
fall of the Byzantine Empire (1453), were accompanied by an influx of Greek scholars and manuscripts to the West, allowing direct comparison between the Arabic commentaries and the original Greek texts of Galen. This
New Learning and the
Humanist movement, particularly the work of
Linacre, promoted
literae humaniores including Galen in the Latin scientific canon,
De Naturalibus Facultatibus appearing in London in 1523. Debates on medical science now had two traditions, the more conservative Arabian and the liberal Greek. Galenism's final defeat came from a combination of the negativism of Paracelsus and the constructivism of the Italian Renaissance anatomists, such as
Vesalius in the 16th century. The examinations of Vesalius also disproved medical theories of
Aristotle and
Mondino de Liuzzi. One of the best known examples of Vesalius' overturning of Galenism was his demonstration that the
interventricular septum of the heart was not permeable, as Galen had taught (
Nat Fac III xv). However, this had been revealed two years before by Michael Servetus in his fateful "
Christianismi restitutio" (1553) with only three copies of the book surviving, but these remained hidden for decades; the rest were burned shortly after its publication because of persecution of Servetus by religious authorities.
Michael Servetus, using the name "Michel de Villeneuve" during his stay in France, was
Vesalius' fellow student and the best Galenist at the University of Paris, according to
Johann Winter von Andernach, who taught both. In the Galenism of the Renaissance, editions of the
Opera Omnia by Galen were very important, beginning from the
Aldine Press'
editio princeps in Venice in 1525. It was followed in Venice in 1541–1542 by the Giunta. There were fourteen editions of the book from that date until 1625. Just one edition was produced from Lyon between 1548 and 1551. The Lyon edition has commentaries on breathing and blood streaming that correct the work of earlier renowned authors such as
Vesalius,
Caius, or
Janus Cornarius. "Michel De Villeneuve" had contracts with Jean Frellon for that work, and the Servetus scholar-researcher Francisco Javier González Echeverría presented research that became an accepted communication in the
International Society for the History of Medicine, which concluded that Michael De Villeneuve (
Michael Servetus) is the author of the commentaries of this edition of Frellon, in
Lyon. Another convincing case where understanding of the body was extended beyond where Galen had left it came from these demonstrations of the nature of human circulation and the subsequent work of
Andrea Cesalpino,
Fabricio of Acquapendente, and
William Harvey.
Contemporary scholarship Galenic scholarship remains an intense and vibrant field, with interest in Galen's work bolstered by the German encyclopedia
Realencyclopädie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft. In 2018, the
University of Basel discovered that a mysterious Greek
papyrus with
mirror writing on both sides, which is in the collection of
Basilius Amerbach, a professor of
jurisprudence at the university in the 16th century, is an unknown medical document of Galen or an unknown commentary on his work. The medical text describes the phenomenon of "hysterical apnea". ==See also==