Surgeon to the gladiators--with video
August 6, 2001 - As surgeon to the gladiators of antiquity, Galen is considered by classics scholars as the first sports physician. Confident to the point of egotism, he claimed never to have lost a gladiator under his care.
"We know lots about Galen because he tells us a lot in his writings about himself," says Dr. Tana Allen, a specialist in ancient medicine in the University of Alberta's classics department. "He is extremely egotistical, we might say…just so full of himself. He's always tooting his own horn."
The physician, philosopher and rhetorician wrote a huge number of tracts during his lifetime, most of which were supposedly lost in a fire. Even so, some 20,000 pages of text remain, only a fraction of which has been translated into English. Next to Hippocrates, he's the most important physician of the ancient world.
Because he spent so much time attacking other medical theorists and describing their ideas in the process, Galen has become the principle source of information on those who came before him. His own ideas remained influential until the 18th, and in some cases even the 19th, centuries, says Allen.
Galen was born in Pergamum, a major cultural centre, to well-heeled Greek parents in AD 129. When he was 16, his father dreamt that the divine healing God, Asclepius, told him his son should study medicine. "That was kind of unusual, because an aristocratic person [of the age] wouldn't study medicine," says Allen.
Galen traveled around the Roman world studying medicine for the next 12 years before returning to his home town to care for gladiators. "It's really during that period that he gets his experience in exercise and trying out different diet regimens, as well as surgical techniques in combat," says Allen.
Galen had all kinds of advice for athletes on the right ways to exercise, some of it quite bizarre by modern standards. But one thing he discovered was that excess exercise could be harmful to the average person. Ironically it's taken us almost 2,000 years to come around to a similar view in our own day.
Galen eventually headed off to Rome, where he became "extremely famous." He became physician to the upper classes, even to emperors. Women would write to him asking for advice. He became both admired and despised for his inflated sense of confidence.
"He put down colleagues for caring only about money instead of good health," says Allen. "But of course he became very rich, so it's easy to say money's evil when you have a lot of it."
Galen's most enduring contribution to the history of medicine turned out to be his observations in anatomy, which were translated by Arab thinkers in the ninth century and were highly esteemed by Renaissance physicians. Though his medical observations were full of mistakes, Galen remained an important authority until a sixteenth-century anatomist called Vesalius began to disprove his theories.
For a link to a video related to this story, and other University of Alberta Sport Short videos, please go to: http://208.38.3.203/movie.htm
Related links - external
The Edmonton 2001 IAAF World Championships in Athletics Web site: www.2001.edmonton.com/splash.asp
For more information on Galen, check out these Web sites:
www.med.virginia.edu/hs-library/historical/antiqua/galen.htm
encarta.msn.com/find/Concise.asp?ti=030FA000
