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24-06-2015, 01:42

Galen

Raised in the city of Pergamum (PUR-guh-mum) in Asia Minor, Galen studied at the medical school attached to the temple of Ascle-pias (ah-SLEE-pee-uhs), the Greek god of medicine. At age twenty, he journeyed to Alexandria and other cities, where he had an opportunity to study anatomy by working with skeletons. But medical students were forbidden to work on dead bodies for religious reasons.

Back in Pergamum, however, twenty-eight-year-old Galen began working as a physician for the gladiators there. This work gave him plenty of opportunity to study “blood and guts.” In A. D. 161, Galen went to Rome, where he became well-known as a lecturer and wrote some of his many works, 120 of which survive. He also acted as physician to the emperor Marcus Aurelius (see entry). He served the two emperors who followed and probably died in Rome in about A. D. 200.

Although he could not use human bodies, Galen dissected a wide variety of animals and made a number of observations, some of which were not accurate when applied to the human system. He noted a difference between veins, which carry blood to the heart, and arteries, which carry blood from it. Unfortunately, Galen thought that the liver was the principal organ for pumping blood and that the arteries carried a “spirit” he called pneuma.

Yet Galen was also quite forward-looking in a number of his observations. He was the first to discover, as all

Weightlifters today know, that muscles work in pairs: as one expands, another contracts. He demonstrated that an injury to the spinal cord can cause paralysis (puhr-AL-i-sis), or the inability to move one's limbs. He recognized that urine flows from the kidney to the bladder.

His ideas about blood flow, along with his belief in the “humors,” were among Galen's negative contributions to medieval medicine. But it was not Galen's fault that no serious anatomists appeared after his time and that his work therefore became scripture. Only with the discoveries of the British anatomist William Harvey (1578-1657) and others would scientists develop a more accurate understanding of how the body works.