At a time when religious taboo forbade dissection of corpses, he found ingenious ways to investigate anatomy. He developed treatments based on herbs and spices, which he administered to fellow doctors for verification. But he also pioneered the empirical study of human functions and diseases. Galen adhered to many prevalent medical theories, including the concept of humours - based on bodily fluids such as blood - and the curative properties of ‘divinely’ inspired dreams. Becoming renowned as a physician and philosopher, he was called to Rome. His path to that exalted position took him from the Greek city of Pergamon (in what is now Turkey) to Alexandria, Egypt, where he mastered the work of predecessors such as Hippocrates and Herophilus. He wrote Hygiene at the peak of his career, as physician to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Galen’s originality and insight were hard-won, as historian Susan Mattern has described in her 2013 biography The Prince of Medicine. Credit: Peter Paul Rubens/Wellcome/ CC BY And he realized the importance of a healthy youth as the basis for a robust old age.Īn eighteenth-century mezzotint of a bust of Galen, by John Faber after a drawing by Peter Paul Rubens. He recognized that a person’s ageing ‘path’ is highly individual, with a wide range of possible health outcomes at each stage. It joins the extraordinary archive of Galen’s medical writing, which comprises around 10% of extant ancient Greek literature.Īs Johnston clarifies, Galen thought of ageing holistically, as a lifelong process with a number of stages, of which three were crucial: the first seven years of life, maturity and old age proper. Ian Johnston’s excellent translation of Hygiene is the best appreciation yet of the classic - with the added benefit of a medically informed introduction (Johnston is a former neurosurgeon). Thus the work, also known as De sanitate tuenda (‘On the preservation of health’), resonates to a startling degree with ideas today, both on care of the elderly ( gerokomica in ancient Greek) and on models of ageing. His treatise Hygiene, written around ad 175 and featuring the only surviving classical study of gerontology, framed ageing as a natural process that can be eased or even delayed through preventive measures such as diet. The prodigious Greek physician Galen thought otherwise. How did the ancients see ageing? Many in the classical West saw old age as a disease. Hygiene, Volumes I & II (Loeb Classical Library) Galen (Translated by Ian Johnston) Loeb (2018) A Greek amphora from the sixth century bc depicts a man drinking wine - as would later be recommended for the elderly by the physician Galen.
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