Summary. To resume, then: What contribution can Galen bring to the art of healing at the present day? It was not, surely, for nothing that the great Pergamene gave laws to the medical world for over a thousand years!
Let us draw attention once more to:
(1) The high ideal which he set before the profession.
(2) His insistence on immediate contact with nature as the primary condition for arriving at an understanding of disease; on the need for due consideration of previous authorities; on the need also for reflection—for employment of the mind’s eye (ἡ λογικὴ θεωρία) as an aid to the physical eye.
(3) His essentially broad outlook, which often helped him in the comprehension of a phenomenon through his knowledge of an analogous phenomenon in another field of nature.
(4) His keen appreciation of the unity of the organism, and of the inter-dependence of its parts; his realisation that the vital phenomena (physiological and pathological) in a living organism can only be understood when considered in relation to the environment of that organism or part. This is the foundation for the war that Galen waged à outrance on the Methodists, to whom diseases were things without relation to anything. This dispute is, unfortunately, not touched upon in the present volume. What Galen combated was the tendency, familiar enough in our own day, to reduce medicine to the science of finding a label for each patient, and then treating not the patient, but the label. (This tendency, we may remark in parenthesis, is one which is obviously well suited for the standardising purposes of a State medical service, and is therefore one which all who have the weal of the profession at heart must most jealously watch in the difficult days that lie ahead.)
(5) His realisation of the inappropriateness and inadequacy of physical formulae in explaining physiological activities. Galen’s disputes with Asclepiades over τὰ πρῶτα ἐκεῖνα σώματα τὰ ἀπαθῆ, over the ἄναρμα στοιχεῖα καὶ ληρώδεις ὄγκοι, is but another aspect of his quarrel with the Methodists regarding their pathological “units,” whose primary characteristic was just this same ἀπάθεια (impassiveness to environment, “unimpressionability”). We have of course [Pg xl] our Physiatric or Iatromechanical school at the present day, to whom such processes as absorption from the alimentary canal, the respiratory interchange of gases, and the action of the renal epithelium are susceptible of a purely physical explanation.[4]
(6) His quarrel with the Anatomists, which was in essence the same as that with the Atomists, and which arose from his clear realisation that that primary and indispensable desideratum, a view of the whole, could never be obtained by a mere summation of partial views; hence, also, his sense of the dangers which would beset the medical art if it were allowed to fall into the hands of a mere crowd of competing specialists without any organising head to guide them.
[1] On the Affections of the Mind, p. 41 (Kühn’s ed.).