Galen

The early Galen

Galen entered the world in Pergamon, an extant town in present day Turkey. Pergamon had existed before the time of Alexander the Great, becoming a center of culture with a famous library containing some 200,000 books. Galen’s father, a wealthy architect, steered his son into a career in medicine as the result of a ‘Hippocratic’ dream, sending him to the Hippocratic school in Pergamon, a part of the Roman Empire. Afterwards, in 152 CE, he continued to study medicine in Alexandria, returning six years later, to become surgeon to the gladiators in the amphitheater at Pergamon. There he treated gladiators with all kinds of open wounds, of the head, chest, abdomen, muscles. He began to wonder how the various parts of the body he could glimpse worked and worked together.