Birth of Galen

Galen was born in September 129 CE in Pergamon. A Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher from Pergamon, Galen trained in the great medical centres of the Mediterranean and worked as physician to gladiators before moving to Rome, where he treated emperors including Marcus Aurelius. He wrote an enormous number of works on anatomy, physiology and treatment. Because dissecting human bodies was forbidden, he based his anatomy on animals, which led to errors that were repeated for centuries. His ideas, built on the theory of the four humours, dominated European and Islamic medicine until the Renaissance, when Vesalius and Harvey began to correct them. His surviving writings make up a large part of ancient Greek medical literature.

Open on the timeline