Galaxy

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

. See Milky Way Galen (130-201), a celebrated physician of Grecian birth and Roman practice. Having exhausted the educational resources of Greece, he gained a wide reputation as a healer of disease. He went to Rome, as many educated Greeks of that period did. He attended the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in his northern wars with the barbarians, and expressed gratification on account of the opportunity for dissection offered by barbarian warriors slain in battle. Galen wrote a large number of works of which eighty-three are extant, covering the field of medicine surprisingly well. Galen's treatises were translated from the original Greek into Arabic and Latin and English, and later into other modern languages. They are the channel through which Greek medicine has been made known. Galen's authority remained supreme until about the time when our Atlantic coast was occupied by colonies. As late as the middle of the sixteenth century a London physician, who had assailed the teachings of Galen, was obliged to take back what he had said and to hand in a written apology on penalty of expulsion from the College of Physicians. Later Galen's teachings were stoutly opposed on account of excessive blood letting or cupping, and the use of herbs too exclusively as remedies. Oliver Wendell Holmes, lecturing before the medical students of Harvard, spoke of "remedies which are both Galenic and chemical," that is, both vegetable and mineral, and again, "These Galenists were what we should call herb-doctors today." The housewife, with an oldfashioned store of boneset, sage, sassafras, pennyroyal, and spikenard, is a Galenist without knowing it. See Medicine ; Averroes