Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/68

 62 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

scorides (40 B.C.) the physician of Cleopatra, and Aristoxenes (a.d. 79). Demetrius of Bithynia and Heron of Alexandria are well known nameB in Alexandrine medicine. Heron, a mathematician and physicist as well as physician, was a contemporary of Archimedes; he described a water- organ, the invention of his teacher Ctesibius.

The other great school of medicine in a Grecian colony which alone rivalled Alexandria in learning and culture was Pergamos, that same Pergamos where " Satan^s seat is,^' as it is expressed in the address to the Angel of the church at Pergamos. The library at Pergamos was almost as famous as that at Alexandria: when Ptolemy Soter would not allow the exportation of papyrus from Egypt, the Pergamites used animal skins for their books, hence " parchment.'*

The age-renowned Galen was a graduate of the school at Pergamos, and the names of his teachers in anatomy and pathology survive to this day. He studied anatomy also at Smyrna under one Pelops, and for some time at Alexandria under Heraclianus. It was here, he says, he had the good fortune to see a human skeleton.

Claudius Galenus (to give him his Latinized name) was a Greek, he wrote in Greek, and his works were not translated into Latin until the fifteenth century. Galen, the son of an architect Nicon, was born at Pergamos in a.d. 130 and died in Rome, it is believed, about the year 200. Nicon, having had a dream bearing on his son's future, devoted him to a study of philosophy and medicine from as early as his fifteenth year. On retumiing from his travels to his native city when he waa about 28 years old, Galen was appointed surgeon to the school of Gladi- ators at Pergamos. Six years later he went to Home where he lectured on physiology and on medicine, it would appear, on Hippocratic lines. He does not seem to have had very amicable relations with his colleagues, so he left Bome for a time and returned to Pergamos. After about a year's absence, he was recalled by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius to whom he be- came physician. Declining to accompany his master on his military ex- pedition against the Marcomanni, Galen remained in Bome as physician to the Emperor Commodus. Though Galen cetrainly extended the knowl- edge of both structure and function beyond Hippocratic limits, he cor- rected, unfortunately, but few of the worst Hippocratic mistakes. It is doubtful whether he ever dissected the human body, for, as Vesalius pointed out, his anatomical descriptions apply chiefly to the monkey and the pig. Hence he commits the serious anatomical error of placing the human heart in the mid-line instead of to the left of it. In physiobgy he went far beyond Hippocrates, probably because he dissected so many animal types, and certainly because he examined some of them while still alive. Galen was known in Bome as the ''wonder worker," on account of his having cured Commodus of a very severe illness.

If Hippocrates is the Father of Medicine, and Aristotle the Father

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