Prince of Medicine by Mattern Susan P.;

Author:Mattern, Susan P.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

GALEN AND HIS PATIENTS

t this point we lose the narrative thread of Galen’s life. We know—from one vague reference—that he suffered in the reign of Marcus’s son and successor, the unstable and narcissistic emperor Commodus, fearing for his home and property if he should be arbitrarily exiled (Ind. 54–55). Galen’s writings, which contain many internal and cross-references, can be more or less organized in relative chronological order, but they contain few references to dateable events in his own life or in the world around him. There is a major exception—the fire of 192 C.E., which changed his life and which will be described in the next chapter. His treatise On Theriac to Piso, long considered spurious but now accepted as genuine by many scholars, addresses the emperors Severus and Caracalla and must date to after 204 C.E. because it refers to an event from the Secular Games of that year. If he did write this treatise, it proves that Galen was still to be found in Rome forty years from the date that Marcus Aurelius recalled him to Italy.1 He seems to have visited Pergamum, where he still owned property, at least once; he stopped at Lemnos for the second time on the way, as mentioned in previous chapters. But there is no obvious evidence in his writings of a long stay outside of Italy. He implies that he served each successive emperor after Marcus Aurelius in turn in some capacity, in his discussion of cinnamon from On Antidotes (see chapter 6), and probably remained on the imperial payroll. He continued to anatomize—this is very likely, because he continued work on the exhaustive treatise On Anatomical Procedures and rewrote the final books when they were lost in the fire of 192 (Anat. Admin. 11.11, 135 Simon). He continued to write very prolifically; his lengthy pharmacological treatises and the second half of his great therapeutic tract On the Method of Healing, among many other works, date to after the fire and the last decades of his life. But most importantly, he treated patients.

Galen describes hundreds of individual cases, anecdotally, in his surviving works. Visits to patients were a normal part of his daily life, and he performed these so diligently that it is difficult to understand how he also had the time to anatomize and to write, as he clearly did, or even to mix the emperor’s theriac. He visited his sick patients every day, sometimes more than once. He might respond to a summons in the middle of the night and might begin his round of examinations before dawn; he mentions visiting patients in the morning, afternoon, evening, and late at night. Into the room of one patient, suffering from a wasting illness, Galen brought a lactating donkey so that he could suckle its milk directly. Another patient, a steward (probably a slave or freedman) suffering from an eye inflammation, lived in a suburb too far for Galen to visit, so Galen brought him home to live in his house, where he bled him twice and treated him several times per day with eye salve.

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