The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire

Susan Mattern raises Galen to life with a full pharmacopoeia of information. Whether biographical, cultural, or professional, she animates a recognizable name and converts it into a reachable personality.We see the physician Galen as a workaholic devoted to medicine. We see him as a committed scholar, frequent lecturer, and prolific author whose work, according to Mattern, accounts for "one-eighth of all the classical Greek literature that survives." He is presented as the premier anatomist of his day (and many thousands of days to follow). And Mattern describes him as a showman reminiscent, perhaps, of some mix of Houdini and Jonathan Winters in his ability to improvise and dazzle in front of a fascinated audience watching him at work with his knife. Galen was remarkable in many other ways, including the fact that he did not accept fees but did make house calls. A physician to gladiators and to the household of Marcus Aurelius, he also ministered to the broad range of people in the street.Galen's treatments of more than 1,800 years ago naturally puzzle today, such as directing patients to urinate on their own wounds, or using dove dung, snake flesh and other exotic substances. One wonders what specific link Galen perceived between the rub of a bug and the cure of a rash, but that was a brand of reasoning centuries down the road. Mattern says Galen's "most relevant contribution" is his "clinical practice" and that he "never lost sight of the idea that medicine is about treating patients."This, then is a very good book. But it comes with a "tax" attached. At least 140 times, the author uses variants of the phrases "see below," "see before," or most annoying of all, "as I have mentioned." These intrude, distract, and ultimately aggravate in the same way TV screens temporarily freeze the pixels and interrupt the story. It is a flaw a more exacting editor might have corrected, an unfortunate shadow on an otherwise highly satisfying book.

It is too easy to think that medicine in the Roman world was, like their engineering, commerce, and organization, advanced. This biography of Galen is fascinating both for its portrait of the man who would shape medical knowledge for a thousand years after his death but also for the, honestly, frightening portrayal of practicing medicine in the ancient world.In a world without review boards and insurance networks, how does one pick a doctor? The book demonstrates that doctors vied publicly for reputation and held nothing short of gang battles between rival schools of medical thought. As an ancient doctor, your entourage would confront rival doctors with (say) a bound monkey and open an artery for your rival to fix, publicly Humiliating him if he could not treat the wound.Similarly patients bedsides were a great opportunity to demonstrate the folly of rival doctors’ treatments. And it is this hyper-competitive environment of public medical showmanship that Galen reveled in, performing delicate surgeries or showy anatomical demonstrations to win fame.Competition drove Galen to his greatest anatomical discoveries. Most fascinatingly for this reader, Galen’s discovery of the nerves that control the larynx... which he could tie and untie to silence or give voice to a bleating goat to the wonder of his audience.I was also amazed by just how primitive many of the cures were. Snake flesh to cure leprosy. Crayfish harvested on certain nights of the year were an excellent medical compound.Overall if you’re curious about what getting sick or injured in the ancient world entailed, you will find this book fascinating.

This biography of Galen takes an often misunderstood figure and makes him a real human being. That sounds silly to say but I cannot count the number of times I have read where early modern medicine had to "overcome" Galen. There is a sense of course in which that is true. But "Galen" became synonymous in the popular mind with an image of entrenched dogmatism and wrong-headed theories in medicine. In some ways Galen has the same problem that Aristotle has. Both were wrong in many fundamental ways but, for their times, they laid the foundation for techniques that later would become standard, especially the technique of close observation of nature. What makes the cases of Galen and Aristotle especially ironic is that both these early thinkers who emphasized empirical observation became themselves the objects of stultified theories. Their most positive contributions - the technique of close attention to actual details and continuing to learn from observation - were ignored while their often wrong theories about what they saw and how to deal with it became deified. Susan Mattern brings Galen and all his strengths and weaknesses to life in a way that gets the modern reader to appreciate the historical facts about him. The book strikes a strong blow against the popular negative image of "Galen." It fleshes out the man, not what he became as an object of either worship or scorn from the Middle Ages into the modern world.Mattern is a gifted writer. Her prose flows easily and her ability to combine biographical information with the environment in which Galen lived is superb. This is a rare commodity - a highly readable book about an ancient figure that both keeps close to the data and reads as smoothly as the biography of a modern figure. Galen's oversized ego (and incredible memory), his detestation of opposing figures who often posed as physicians (and his public competitions with them), his personal caring for his patients (often of the lower classes or slaves), his voluminous writings - all are covered in this book. I highly recommend this biography for anyone interested in the history of medicine or the culture of ancient Pergamum and Rome. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

Excellent and derailed coverage of the facts but there are numerous repetions of information throughout the book . Each chapter stands alone but there is considerable overlap amongst chapters . Reading this book simply for the information snd background I think the book would be much easier to read after a thorough editing . On the positive side this book exposes the reader I to invaluable information snd insights not only on Galen but the era surrounding his life

Susan Mattern's writing is both scholarly and fluid. I loved her book on Rome and the Enemy (used it when researching my MA thesis), and this was a delightful turn from what I'm familiar with into the world of a man focused on discovery. If you ever want to know about ancient medicine, this is a great place to start!

Absolutely riveting read about the second century AD Roman doctor Galen. Mattern gives all the most interesting parts of his life: his father's prophetic dream that he should become a doctor, his first challenge during an Anthrax outbreak, his studies in Alexandria, his four year stint as a gladiator doctor, his triumphant arrival in Rome, his appointment as imperial antidote preparer, another plague and the terrible fire that caused him more grief than anything else in his life. One of the most readable books on Ancient Roman life at that period, I found it un-put-downable.

A excellent review of this towering figure in the history of medicine.

"The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire" is an interesting account of the life of Galen, a doctor in the Roman Empire around who lived from 130-200AD, who wrote many books on medical issues including treatment and anatomy. His work was later used dogmatically in a way that held back the advance of medicine, but Galen helped to improve medical knowledge when he was alive and helped to save people who might otherwise have died.Galen spent a lot of time writing and arguing with other doctors and sometimes refuted bad ideas, like the idea that veins carry air rather than blood. He was also a very skilled anatomist, who wrote a lot about where organs fit into the body and that sort of thing. Galen was a skilled surgeon too. He sometimes performed surgery publicly. He would do things like cut open an animal's artery and dare other doctors to sew it back up before the animal died. When the other doctors froze he would do it himself and save the animal. some readers might find this kind of thing distasteful but it illustrates great skill and it is useful to be reminded that people in different times sometimes had very different standard from the ones we have today. The book also explains Galen's response to various problems like the plague and how to practise medicine in places where people are very poor (you have to take advantange of what is available not wish for stuff that isn't available).The author tries to argue that Galen sometimes anticipated knowledge we have now. This is not always successful and I think the best thing to learn from Galen is that you shouldn't take for granted things that everybody thinks are true or seem obvious.This book is worth reading as an account of the life and work of an interesting person from a period of history very different to the present.