According to him, a good physician must be a philosopher: Who is Galen?

Cassius Claudius Galenos of Pergamon, known as Galen, Galene, Galien by Westerners and as Calinus by Islamic physicians, was born in Bergama in 130 AD. His father, Nikon, was a wealthy architect who provided him with a good education and financial means. His mother was a stern, angry person; perhaps for this reason, his father may have named him Galen, meaning calm.

Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus (September 129 – c. AD 216), often Anglicized as Galen or Galen of Pergamon, was a Roman Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher. Considered to be one of the most accomplished of all medical researchers of antiquity, Galen influenced the development of various scientific disciplines, including anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, and neurology, as well as philosophy and logic.

Little Galen's father buys a farm to deal with his experiments. Here he works on the aging of wine by hearth fire, long before Louis Pasteur's Études Sur Le Vin (Treatises on Wine). At the age of 16, he decides to become a physician; He begins to learn anatomy from Satyrus in Pergamum. During this period, he wrote a work on the anatomy of the uterus (womb) and dedicated it to a midwife.

He loses his father at the age of twenty; First, he went to Izmir and took lessons from the anatomist Pelops. Here he wrote On the Movement of the Chest and the Lungs. Later, he went to Corinth (Greece, Peloponnese) and took lessons from Numisianus, teacher of Pelops and student of Quintus. He goes to Alexandria and learns all the intricacies of Ancient Egyptian Medicine there. When he returned to Bergama in 157 AD, he was known as an experienced physician, a skilled researcher, and a knowledgeable anatomist.

In 161 AD, the year Marcus Aurelius ascended the throne, he went to Rome and achieved success in a short time; At the encouragement of the consul and philosopher Boethius, he wrote the Anatomical Method and the Study of the Parts of the Human Body. As a court physician, Galen made public demonstrations and controversial experimental practices. When he returned to Bergama towards the end of his life, he was the author of 500 or 600 books. Galen, who never married, dies in Pergamum in AD 200. All he loved was Hippocrates; The Corpus Hippocraticum (the work containing the teachings of Hippocrates) had been written five hundred years ago but was almost forgotten. Galen revives it and establishes this book as the fundamental book of medicine. He writes articles to make the Corpus Hippocraticum more valuable, and even his comments on Hippocratic books are sometimes longer than the original.

Although the medicine of Galen was basically Hippocratic, from the scientific point of view it was further than that as a member of the Alexandrian School (despite some of its faults). This superiority becomes even more evident with Galen's experimentation and dissection (cutting, separating), especially in basic medicine. As it is known, Hippocrates examined diseases with a naturalist's eye and defended the healing power of nature by setting the rule vis mediatrix naturae (organisms left alone can usually heal themselves). Galen, on the other hand, examines nature (body) with a scientific eye. The Use of Organs includes experiments that were never known in his work; He opens his living arteries and writes that they are filled with blood, not air. Writing such an observation is not easy at a time when everyone believes otherwise.

Galen compares a physician without anatomy knowledge to an architect without a plan. Anatomy is just beginning to be revealed through his methodical studies; According to him, anatomy should be plausible proof of the absolute dominion of the Creator. With this perspective, Galen turns to philosophy to create a perfect system in which each organ has both its functions and its diseases. According to him, a good physician must be a philosopher. This belief is so deep that; He talks about the work of nerves as a religious experiment.

Galen's primary interests are basic medical sciences and internal medicine, not surgery. Nor has he written a book on surgery; but he left in notes the interesting aspects of his experiences with gladiator injuries in the Bergama Arena, where he worked as a surgeon for three years. During this time, he worked on the healing of wounded gladiators; This resulted in a significant reduction in gladiator deaths.

Although many of his theories have been judged by modern physiology, some of Galen's analyzes are very accurate. For example, he said that the diaphragm acts as a respiratory muscle and that one of the tasks of the nose and nasopharynx (upper pharynx) is to warm the inhaled air and clean it from particles.

Galen believed that diseases like Hippocrates had natural causes. According to Galen, an accurate diagnosis is the first step towards treatment and all diseases can be explained by fluid theory. Nutrients are burned in the heart by internal heat and fluids are produced. Warm foods increase bile production, while cold foods increase phlegm production. Thus, an increase in bile leads to the development of "hot disease", and an increase in sputum leads to the development of "cold disease".

According to Galen, the course of the disease can be predicted by pulse and urine examination, which is the contrary opinion of Hippocrates. On treatment, Galen differs from Hippocrates; instead of applying the principle of doing no harm like him, he proposes to act immediately. Blood collection (hijama) is a treatment method recommended for almost every medical problem. Rome did not know such a thing before Galen. Galen brought many surgical applications with him; such as cataract surgery or abscess opening. Surgical practices were very successful. Enema, cupping, and starvation diets were also recommended abundantly. As these treatments were applied throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, their effects continue today.

According to the rumor, the patient, whom Galen did not accept to Asklepion (the most important health center of the Hellenistic period and the Roman Empire) because he thought he was helpless, wanted to commit suicide by drinking the venom of the two snakes from the bowl in which they vomited, but on the contrary, he was healed. Thereupon, Galen declares the snake figure as the symbol of Asklepion. Historians, on the other hand, say that the snake-healing relationship emerged much earlier than that. The figure of a snake wrapped around a staff is seen in many works of antiquity, and in Ancient Egypt, the snake was used as a symbol of medical science.

Since dissection of the human body was not allowed in Roman times, Galen believed that all the structures involved in the formation of animals are also in humans, so he studied animals. In these studies, he obtained inaccurate information as well as very detailed information. Although he worked on many animals, he mainly preferred monkeys, pigs, goats, and sheep. Galen also developed many mixtures in medicine and used exotic materials such as Cyprus copper, Lemnos island soil, Palestinian resin (he had the opportunity to go to all these regions personally and make professional examinations), and various kinds of slime in their production. He is considered to be the father of pharmacy and today the mixture of medicines prepared by the pharmacist according to a certain formula is called Galenic.

Galen's teachings began to be learned with the science movement that started with Beyt-ül Hikme in the East in the 8th century. The translator of Galen was Hunayn Ibn Ishaq al Ibadi, the physician in the Baghdad palace; Later, thanks to his translations into Latin, Galen became known in the West. Thanks to these translations from the East, Europe can recognize Galen, whom Ibn Sina often refers to in his famous work El-Kânûn Fi't-Tıb, at a very late period.