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 His medical fame began to develop soon after his death. In about a hundred years Eusebius, Bishop of Cæsarea, reproaches the world with treating Galen almost as a divinity. Nearly all the later Roman medical writers drew freely from his works, and some seemed to depend entirely on them. Arabic medicine was largely based on Galen's teaching, and it was the Arabic manuscripts translated into Latin which furnished the base of the medical teaching of Europe from the eleventh and twelfth centuries to the eighteenth.

Galen aimed to create a perfect system of physiology, pathology, and treatment. He is alleged to have written 500 treatises on medicine, and 250 on other subjects, philosophy, laws, grammar. Nothing like this number remains, and the so-called "books" are often what we should call articles. His known and accepted medical works number eighty-five. All his writings were originally in Greek.

Oribasius, like Galen, was a native of Pergamos, and was physician to and friend of the Emperor Julian. He is noted for having compiled seventy-two books in which he collected all the medical science of preceding writers. This was undertaken at the instance of Julian. Only seventeen of these books have been preserved to modern times. Oribasius adds to his compilation many original observations of his own, and in these often shows remarkable good sense. He was the originator of the necklace method of treatment, for he recommends a necklace of beads made of peony wood to be worn in epilepsy, but does not rely on this means alone.