Galen On The Natural Faculties

by Galen (Creator)

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Genres: Science, Philosophy, Classics, Nonfiction, Medicine, History, Natural History

406 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 200

About the author

Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus (AD 129–c. 200/c. 216), better known as Galen of Pergamon (modern-day Bergama, Turkey), was a prominent Roman (of Greek ethnicity) physician, surgeon and philosopher. Arguably the most accomplished of all medical researchers of antiquity, Galen contributed greatly to the understanding of numerous scientific disciplines, including anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, and neurology, as well as philosophy and logic.

The son of Aelius Nicon, a wealthy architect with scholarly interests, Galen received a comprehensive education that prepared him for a successful career as a physician and philosopher. He traveled extensively, exposing himself to a wide variety of medical theories and discoveries before settling in Rome, where he served prominent members of Roman society and eventually was given the position of personal physician to several emperors.

Galen's understanding of anatomy and medicine was principally influenced by the then-current theory of humorism, as advanced by many ancient Greek physicians such as Hippocrates. His theories dominated and influenced Western medical science for more than 1,300 years. His anatomical reports, based mainly on dissection of monkeys, especially the Barbary Macaque, and pigs, remained uncontested until 1543, when printed descriptions and illustrations of human dissections were published in the seminal work De humani corporis fabrica by Andreas Vesalius where Galen's physiological theory was accommodated to these new observations. Galen's theory of the physiology of the circulatory system endured until 1628, when William Harvey published his treatise entitled De motu cordis, in which he established that blood circulates, with the heart acting as a pump. Medical students continued to study Galen's writings until well into the 19th century. Galen conducted many nerve ligation experiments that supported the theory, which is still accepted today, that the brain controls all the motions of the muscles by means of the cranial and peripheral nervous systems.

Galen saw himself as both a physician and a philosopher, as he wrote in his treatise entitled That the Best Physician is also a Philosopher. Galen was very interested in the debate between the rationalist and empiricist medical sects, and his use of direct observation, dissection and vivisection represents a complex middle ground between the extremes of those two viewpoints. Many of his works have been preserved and/or translated from the original Greek, although many were destroyed and some credited to him are believed to be spurious. Although there is some debate over the date of his death, he was no younger than seventy when he died.

Reviews

[Roy Lotz · Rating 2 out of 5]

The fact is that those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn!

This little book was appended to my Great Books of the Western World copy of the Hippocratic writings, so I decided to go ahead and read it. I’m not sure I’m happy with that decision. Having, by now, read my fair share of ancient science, I must confess that the experience is often stultifyingly dull; and this little treatise was one of the worst I’ve so far read.

Well, who was Galen? It’s a name we don’t often hear nowadays; but Galen’s influence was, according to everything I’ve heard, enormous. From his death to the Renaissance, Galen was the major authority in medicine. To me, this is both depressing and terrifying, because Galen does not make a good impression in this treatise. In truth, he often comes across as an oaf.

Galen begins with the Aristotelian premise that “nature does nothing in vain,” and, from there, attempts to prove that the internal organs function because they have certain faculties. He is defending the doctrine of the four humors, which is found in both Aristotle and Hippocrates, against his main nemesis, Erasistratus, who subscribes to the atomic theory of matter. The treatise then alternates between fallacious reasoning, mind-numbing and inaccurate descriptions of the workings of internal organs, and vituperation of all who disagree with him, whom Galen dismisses as mindless sectarians, simpletons, or as lacking sufficient reverence for the wise ancients.

Meanwhile, Galen’s recriminations are hypocritical in the extreme. For one, he is himself a sectarian, digging in his heels to defend the Hippocratic school. What’s more, his reasoning is often equivalent to that parodied by Molière, who has a quack 'explain' how opium puts people to sleep by citing opium’s “soporific power.” Consider the following:

It has been made clear in the preceding discussion that nutrition occurs by an alteration or assimilation of that which nourishes to that which receives nourishment, and that there exists in every part of the animal a faculty which in view of its activity we call, in general terms, alterative, or, more specifically, assimilative and nutritive.

In other words, nutrition occurs because of the nutritive faculty. In fact, the contents of this book can be summarized like so: Bodily organs attract and retain what is of their nature, and expel what is foreign, by means of their faculties.

There is a common stereotype about Roman culture—which I hesitate to believe because it is a stereotype—that the Romans were unoriginal, and cultural parasites of the Greeks. Surely, that seems simplistic. But it’s hard to shake off as entirely false. The Roman national epic, the Aeneid, was a self-conscious attempt to emulate Homer; Roman arts and architecture were manifestly influenced by the Greeks; and the major Roman philosophical efforts were recapitulations of Greek thinkers: Plotinus the Neo-Platonist, Lucretius the Epicurean, Marcus Aurelius the Stoic. Now we have Galen to add to the mix, the dogmatic adherent of Hippocrates.

Well, I don’t want to push that too far, because surely it is simplistic. But one thing that I am absolutely certain of is that I wouldn’t want Galen as my physician.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I proceeded through the pages about urine, bile and digestion, I had difficulty understanding why Galen was included in Britannica’s Great Books list. Then I came to this passage near the end:

While, however, the statements which the Ancients made on these points were correct, they yet omitted to defend their arguments with logical proofs; of course they never suspected that there could be sophists so shameless as to try to contradict obvious facts. More recent physicians, again, have been partly conquered by the sophistries of these fellows and have given credence to them; whilst others who attempted to argue with them appear to me to lack to a great extent the power of the Ancients. For this reason I have attempted to put together my arguments in the way in which it seems to me the Ancients, had any of them been still alive, would have done, in opposition to those who would overturn the finest doctrines of our art.

I am not, however, unaware that I shall achieve either nothing at all or else very little. For I find that a great many things which have been conclusively demonstrated by the Ancients are unintelligible to the bulk of the Moderns owing to their ignorance- nay, that, by reason of their laziness, they will not even make an attempt to comprehend them; and even if any of them have understood them, they have not given them impartial examination.

The fact is that he whose purpose is to know anything better than the multitude do must far surpass all others both as regards his nature and his early training. And when he reaches early adolescence he must become possessed with an ardent love for truth, like one inspired; neither day nor night may he cease to urge and strain himself in order to learn thoroughly all that has been said by the most illustrious of the Ancients. And when he has learnt this, then for a prolonged period he must test and prove it, observing what part of it is in agreement, and what in disagreement with obvious fact; thus he will choose this and turn away from that. To such an one my hope has been that my treatise would prove of the very greatest assistance.... Still, such people may be expected to be quite few in number, while, as for the others, this book will be as superfluous to them as a tale told to an ass. pgs.75-76

After some outside research (i.e. Wikipedia and Google), it became apparent that Galen was the authority on medicine until the Renaissance. His authoritative claims went unchallenged for over a millennia.

Galen does not hide his contempt for his contemporaries who classify themselves as “Erasistrateans” or “Asclepiadeans.” Galen considered himself beyond such labels and dedicated himself to critical analysis. He suffers no fools as he haughtily dismisses the theories that fail to survive his experimentation and logical conclusions. A true empiricist, he devotes himself to questioning all theories and constructing medical proofs while simultaneously reverently referring to his predecessors whom he deemed worthy- especially Hippocrates and Aristotle.

Though Galen’s importance in medical history is probably not much debated, the actual work itself yields little to anyone today except medical historians. Galen was referring to his contemporaries in the above quote but, sadly, On the Natural Faculties is not a timeless work and, to myself and most readers, will truly be as “superfluous… as a tale told to an ass.”

[J. Boo]

Fascinating review hosted here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p...

The reviewer points out that a lot of the criticism of Galen - usually revolving around his supposed anti-empiricism - is off-base. Galen, in fact, was pretty enthusiastic about real world testing, vivisecting quite a few animals in the name of science.

"The most extreme example comes from a debate with the disciples of Asclepiades about the function of the ureters, trying to convince this rival school that urine flows from the kidneys to the bladder through these channels. After exhausting his rhetorical options, Galen turns to empirical anatomy. First he shows them, in a dead animal, that the ureters connect the two structures. This isn’t enough. Next he shows them “in a still living animal, the urine plainly running out through the ureters into the bladder.” This doesn’t change their minds either.

Next he takes a live animal, ligates the ureters, bandages the animal up, and lets it go. When he opens it up again later, he finds the ureters “quite full and distended”, and when he removes the ligature, everyone can see the urine flow into the bladder.

You’d think the story would end there, but not so. Instead, says Galen, “tie a ligature round [the animal’s] penis and then … squeeze the bladder all over.” He points out that nothing goes back through the ureters to the kidneys, demonstrating that the conveyance is a special, one-way action. He goes on like this for a while. Let the animal urinate and tie a ligature around one ureter but not the other. Cut open both the ureters and see the urine “spurt out of it”. Bandage the animal up and open him up later to discover his insides full of urine and the bladder empty. “Now, if anyone will but test this for himself on an animal,” Galen concludes, “I think he will strongly condemn the rashness of Asclepiades.”

Today we know that Galen was wrong, and that humorism isn’t a great way to think about medicine. But whatever Galen might have been lacking, it certainly was not the empirical bent. He was no armchair philosopher, and was more than happy to cut up lots of animals to make a point about the function of the ureters.

[Sheffielder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Galen's (200 A.D.) view of medicine was based on that of his hero Hippocrates, and was the standard view of medicine until the 1530s, when Vesalius conducted his researches. Galen's emphasis on the importance of blood-letting in certain circumstances influenced medicine as late as the 1800s.

Much of this book is an animated (and by today's standards fairly vicious) attack on the alleged idiocy of those who held views different from his own; its value lies in the arguments Galen puts forward to combat those views, since these arguments explain his own theories, and even give some of the reasons for those theories, based on his extensive practical experience. For example, arguing against "atomic" theory (the classical version, not today's) in favour of continuous matter, Galen insists that the body actively converts food into bile and the like, against his opponents' view that these elemental parts are already present in the food itself, and the body simply separates them out. Similarly, opponents maintained that urine separated from blood because it was the thinner fluid, and was extracted through channels that blood was too thick to enter; Galen argues instead that the kidneys extract urine from the blood and pass it to the bladder, using an "attractive" faculty like that used by lodestone to attract metal.

An interesting read for those interested in the development, both of ideas in general, and medicine in particular.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why read Galen? His science is outdated and, in many cases, flat out wrong. But we don't read ancient scientists for scientific knowledge. We read them to understand what problems they were trying to solve and how they went about solving them.

Not only did Galen have lasting impacts on medicine (for like 1300 years!), he also had important philosophical ideas underpinning his scientific theories.

In particular, Galen observed that the physical world had order. He believed that Nature acts with purpose, pointing to an intelligent creating force. This led to his holistic view of medicine, where he was dissatisfied with purely mechanical explanations of how the body works. Galen strongly believed that the doctor needs to understand why the body functions the way it does, and why a particular treatment works or not, and in doing so the practice of medicine is advanced.

And I do mean strongly. I was amused by how clearly Galen's personality showed in his writings. He was confident (arrogant)! Contemptuous of those who disagreed! Contentious! He must have been quite a character.

[Moses · Rating 1 out of 5]

Apart from whatever merit Galen's work has, this is a terrible edition. Amateurish, cheap, antiquated, and typo-ridden. I've heard this comes in the superb Loeb edition, and if you're really interested in Galen, no doubt that's the one to get.

Back to Galen himself. The man made some progress, but was still incredibly ignorant about the way the body worked. And to jump from him to Harvey is to instantly realize how startlingly little medicine progressed between Galen's time and the 1600s A.D. Saddening, but interesting and very much in contrast with the speedy march of new advances in the field in the last century.

[Robert Kaufman · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is amazing to read the foundations of Medicine. Something of such complexity once was such simplicity.

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Galen drags Erisistratus about his theories about the kidneys in a style which makes me think academia hasn’t really changed since

[Delanie Dooms · Rating 4 out of 5]

A historical medical treatise upon the Natural Faculties--abilities which an organism (or organ, for that matter) has and can use. The latter clause being important because merely having an ability is meaningless without the use of it. For example, Galen's faculty of elimination in the uterus is only a faculty because the uterus both has the ability to eliminate and uses it when the fetus is ready to be born or a problem has occurred requiring evacuation of it's corpse.

What Galen does for most of the treatise is critique his fellow medicine-men, desiring to disprove theories of molecules and atoms in favor of continuous matter. The theories that he goes up against are all of themselves rather absurd, and he acquits himself well, perhaps, in some of his arguments, even as we know that he is arguing, ultimately, from the wrong side of things. It is hard, however, to hear someone argue for the transference of urine from the liver to the bladder via vapor as credible, especially when the tubes connecting said organs exist.

Of course, Galen, in the modern sense, is neither empiricist or idealist. He will use a priori arguments to prove, or seem to prove, points--such, for example, is the means by which he first suggests that, if we assume an attractive factor, and that nature is artistic (all things have a purpose), it must be true that an adhesive or retentive faculty exists--the attraction of certain material meaning little when it all simply decides to go away. However, when thus he proposes the possibility of this retentive faculty, he continues to give evidences through experimentation and description of the proposed faculty. The uterus, he states, contains the fetus until birth. When he fed pigs a wheat mixture and chopped them open a few hours later, the wheat was still in the stomach. Etc.

What, I suppose, I find most applicable to modern science is merely the means by which Galen is willing to come to conclusions--through logic and through experiment. His experiment upon bladders and the kidneys, for example, is superb at proving that urine comes through the ureters into the bladder and expulses itself via the urethra. (One must, if anything, read this experiment's description.)

I cannot think that this book is insightful in it's medical knowledge. It follows the humorist view of medicine (sanguinary, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm), decides that all things come from four basic states (heat, cold, dry, moist), and misrepresents a lot of information (eg., he believes that semen does not fertilize: it feeds upon blood to grow into a fetus and that matter is continuous). Some aspects of his philosophy--such, for example, as the difference between alteration and transference, between things that happen and things that are active (or caused by a faculty)--are perhaps fine, however. Perhaps the collector of interesting details would enjoy this. The story about Ionian children blowing up a pig's bladder, rubbing it on ashes near a fire, and blowing it up some more, suggests interest more than dullness, one must think.

I found this text oddly invigorating. Galen is very fast-paced and his thought is altogether interesting; there is not very often a dull moment. In some sense, this is due to the material provided. His arguments and the picture into the period at which he was writing is, of course, always interesting. In another sense, this is due to Galen himself--for Galen hates his ideological opponents, notwithstanding his ideological leanings (but, of course, he is arguing for the truth, not like his fellows who were wrong!), and this hatred is at times rather more humorous than otherwise.

[Karl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Light but not entertaining reading and hard to see how it would be practically useful. Galen presents his view of what the organs do, sometimes he is right, sometimes he is wrong.

* The ideas in this book seem useless to an ancient doctor. It does not contain empirical observations like "beans make you fat" or "fish gives a long life", instead it discusses ideas like that urine comes from the urinary bladder, points out that the gall blader is very different from the urinary bladder, notes that it is weird that the body can transform "bread to blood". This book feels like ancient infotainment.
* Bread to blood seems to have been a standard idiom from its frequent use in this blood. Connection to "this bread is my flesh, this wine is my blood" of Christianity?
* The phrase "Need for studying the works of the Ancients carefully, in order to reach a proper understanding of this subject" Seems like the real authorities on (useless?) anatomy died centuries before Galen's time. Good luck performing surgery based on

[Jairo Fraga · Rating 2 out of 5]

A biological treatise, mixed with some philosophical matters.

It's an advancement over previous works, like Hippocrates, even though he is well mentioned for considering nature a beauty, and having certain faculties.

Treats food, specially honey, relationship with health, citing Erasistratus, Hippocrates and others.

His talks on human parts, like uterus and stomach, is way more technical than previous philosophers.

This isn't a kind of book I like, just the same as Aristotle books on biology, except the latter is a bit more interesting, due to curiosities noted by the author.

[Bec Sachse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although there is a fair amount of useful information regarding medical understandings during the Roman empire, I unfortunately zoned out a lot of the time. It definitely could have been condensed, but I have a feeling that Galen liked to waffle on considering the size of his works.

[Станислав · Rating 2 out of 5]

Классика медицины с которой человечество жило веками. Без обширного комментария не понятно непосвященному читателю (а возможно и современному медику). Просмотрел.

[David]

Horrible, but funny.

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is hundreds of years old and unfortunately still relevant. Healing involves the whole person not dividable into separate pieces.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Help me out MDs! Am I right in seeing Galen as a progression and perhaps even a corrective to Hippocrates, Eristitatus, and others? Since my background in life science is very limited, I hesitate to be either critical or precise. I know more about physiology now than before I read this, so you can't really lose by reading this, can you? I might suggest reading a little Hippocrates first, as I did, to provide a little context.

[Moses · Rating 2 out of 5]

Galen is debatably less wrong than the earlier Greek physicians whom he so viciously decries, but his crude anatomical theories have little bearing on modern medicine. This edition is poorly edited and poorly laid out. The Loeb Classics edition is much better, but really, why bother?

[John Cairns · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a most systematic and authoritative argument for his own take on scientific medicine in his day and make no wonder Marcus Aurelius wanted him as his personal doctor when off to fight the Germans and not much at Galen's stubbornly staying in Pergamum in preference.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Watching an ancient mind think, especially on a topic like science, helps clear away modern snobbishness.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like with Harvey, I wish my copy had been illustrated so I could follow. However, his 'thing or two to say about other physicians' gave me enough material to commonplace.

[Rivka D. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very entertaining book. Makes one thankful for the progression of technology and medicine....

[Bobbi Martens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crazy, hilarious, and gross at times to see what medicine was like back in the day.

[Robert Kaufman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early medicine and explorations of the body today are just considered gross.