Grant Mark David - Galen on Food and Diet

The life of Galen

Medicine occupies a central position in our lives today. We expect to be diagnosed correctly and to receive the latest treatment based on extensive scientific research. The media enthusiastically recount breakthroughs in our understanding of disease, or complex operations that can restore our quality of life. Alongside this progress psychologists have noted our increasing bewilderment and even anger in the face of death. Wonder at what medicine can achieve is disturbed by what it cannot. It is difficult then to envisage a world where medicine could offer only some comfort and where death, especially among the very young, was always lurking as a very real threat. Yet many historians concede that palliative care by Galen would have been far preferable to anything that was to be available until the closing years of the nineteenth century.

Galen was born in AD 129 at Pergamum, a large city on the Aegean seaboard of what is now Turkey. As his father was an architect and interested in education, Galen was given lessons in mathematics and geometry. For a child from a wealthy background this was in some ways unusual, the emphasis in Roman schools being on the literature and rhetoric necessary for a career as a lawyer or a town councillor. On the other hand architecture, whilst an essential part of Roman civilisation, was not a profession that commanded a particularly high status. This liberal and in some ways radical background allowed Galen the scope to experiment: he was not bound by his family to enter into what was regarded as a traditionally safe career. Moreover, since Pergamum had long been an intellectual and cultural centre, Galen was able to attend the lectures of the Stoic and Platonist philosophers who were attracted to the city by its great library. It is an indication of his mental abilities that Galen was only fourteen when he began these studies.

In addition to its academic excellence, Pergamum was a religious centre with a large sanctuary dedicated to Asclepius. As the son of Apollo, Asclepius acted like a bridge between the divine and the human, for although he was a powerful deity, he was nevertheless concerned enough with mortals to try to combat death through his patronage of medicine. Healing by psychological means was conducted at temples around the Roman world, the sick sleeping in the precincts in the hope of dreaming about their own particular cures. Even outside the temples, dreams were held to predict the future and advise on future courses of action. When Galen was seventeen his father received such a sign: he was to study medicine.