GALEN OF PERGAMUM

born AD 129, , Pergamum, Mysia, Anatolia [now Bergama, Tur.] died c. 216 byname of Greek Galenos, Latin Galenus Greek physician, writer, and philosopher who exercised a dominant influence on medical theory and practice in Europe from the Middle Ages until the mid-17th century. His authority in the Byzantine world and the Muslim Middle East was similarly long-lived. Additional reading English editions with commentaries of Galen's major works include Margaret Tallmadge May (trans.), Galen on the Usefulness of Parts of the Body, 2 vol. (1968); Phillip De Lacy (ed. and trans.), On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, 3 vol. (197884); Vivian Nutton (trans.), On Prognosis (1979); Richard Walzer and Michael Frede (trans.), Three Treatises on the Nature of Science (1985); and Albert Z. Iskandar (trans.), On Examinations by Which the Best Physicians Are Recognized (1988). The selection of passages in Arthur J. Brock, Greek Medicine, Being Extracts Illustrative of Medical Writers from Hippocrates to Galen (1929, reprinted 1977), still offers the best sampling of Galen's own writings.Owsei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (1973), is fundamental. Rudolph E. Siegel, Galen's System of Physiology and Medicine (1968), Galen on Sense Perception (1970), and Galen on Psychology, Psychopathology, and Function and Diseases of the Nervous System (1973), attempt to reconcile Galen with modern medicine. Shorter accounts include sections in two essays by Vivian Nutton, Roman Medicine, 250 BC to AD 200, and Medicine in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, chapters 34 in Laurence Conrad et al., The Western Medical Tradition: 8001800 A.D. (1995); and Simon Swain, Galen, chapter 11 in his Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, AD 50250 (1996), pp. 357379. Vivian Nutton