Galen Medicine Views

Books

Garcia-Ballester says the following of Galen’s use of prognosis: In modern medicine, we are used to distinguishing between the diagnostic judgment (the scientific knowledge of what a patient has) and the prognostic judgment (the conjecture about what will happen to him.) Galen, like the Hippocratics, was not. For him, to understand a clinical case technically, ‘to diagnose’, was among other things, to know with greater or lesser certainty the outcome fore the patient, ‘to prognosticate’. Prognosis, then, is one of the essential problems and most important objectives of Galenic diagnosis. Galen was concerned to distinguish it from divination or prophecy, both to improve diagnosis technically and to enhance the physician’s reputation. [31]

The 11th century Suda lexicon states that Galen died at the age of 70, therefore about the year 199. However, there is a reference in Galen's treatise On Theriac to Piso (which may however be spurious) to events of 204. There are also statements in Arabic sources that he died at 87, after 17 years studying medicine and 70 practicing it, therefore about 217. Nutton[32] believes that On Theriac to Piso is genuine, the Arabic sources are correct and that the Suda has erroneously interpreted the 70 years of Galen's career in the Arabic tradition as referring to his whole lifespan. Boudon-Millot[33] more or less concurs and favours a date of 216.

Galen was highly interested in the importance of combining philosophical thought with medical practice, an idea he expressed in his brief work That the Best Physician is also a Philosopher. He refused to be placed into one particular school of thought, instead taking aspects from each group and combining them with his original thoughts to form his own unique approach to medicine. He was a proponent of medicine as a highly interdisciplinary field that was best practiced by utilizing theory, observation, and experimentation in conjunction to yield the most complete results. This attitude was largely a result of his pluralist education, which exposed him to the four major schools of thought (Platonists, Peripatetics, Stoics, Epicureans), and encouraged him to pick and choose aspects from each to adhere to. His early education also included instruction from teachers who belonged to both the Rationalist and Empiricist sects, allowing him to learn about the merits of both schools.

In his time, Galen's reputation as both physician and philosopher was legendary,[47] the Emperor Marcus Aurelius describing him as Primum sane medicorum esse, philosophorum autem solum (first among doctors and unique among philosophers Praen 14: 660). Other contemporary authors in the Greek world confirm this including Theodotus the Shoemaker, Athenaeus and Alexander of Aphrodisias. The 7th century poet George of Pisida going so far as to refer to Christ as a second and neglected Galen.[48] Galen continued to exert an important influence over the theory and practice of medicine until the mid 17th century in the Byzantine and Arabic worlds and Europe. Hippocrates and Galen form important landmarks of 600 years of Greek medicine. AJ Brock describes them as representing the foundation and apex respectively.[6] A few centuries after Galen Palladius Iatrosophista in his commentary on Hippocrates, stated that Hippocrates sowed and Galen reaped.