Corruption of the medical profession.
Galen states that many tire of the long struggle with crafty and wicked men which they have tried to carry on, relying upon their erudition and honest toil alone, and withdraw disgusted from the madding crowd to save themselves in dignified retirement. He especially marvels at the evil-mindedness of physicians of reputation at Rome. Though they live in the city, they are a band of robbers as truly as the brigands of the mountains. He is inclined to account for the roguery of Roman physicians compared to those of a smaller city by the facts that elsewhere men are not so tempted by the magnitude of possible gain and that in a smaller town everyone is known by everyone else and questionable practices cannot escape general notice. The rich men of Rome fall easy prey to these unscrupulous practitioners who are ready to flatter them and play up to their weaknesses. These rich men can see the use of arithmetic and geometry, which enable them to keep their books straight and to build houses for their domestic comfort, and of divination and astrology, from which they seek to learn whose heirs they will be, but they have no appreciation of pure philosophy apart from rhetorical sophistry.[548]
Lack of real search for truth.
Galen more than once complains that there are no real seekers after truth in his time, but that all are intent upon money, political power, or pleasure. You know very well, he says to one of his friends in the De methodo medendi, that not five men of all those whom we have met prefer to be rather than to seem wise.[549] Many make a great outward display and pretense in medicine and other arts who have no real knowledge.[550] Galen several times expresses his scorn for those who spend their mornings in going about saluting their friends, and their evenings in drinking bouts or in dining with the rich and powerful. Yet even his friends have reproached him for studying too much and not going out more. But while they have wasted their hours thus, he has spent his, first in learning all that the ancients have discovered that is of value, then in testing and practicing the same.[551] Moreover, now-a-days many are trying to teach others what they have never accomplished themselves.[552] Thessalus not only toadied to the rich but secured many pupils by offering to teach them medicine in six months.[553] Hence it is that tailors and dyers and smiths are abandoning their arts to become physicians. Thessalus himself, Galen ungenerously taunts, was educated by a father who plucked wool badly in the women’s apartments.[554] Indeed, Galen himself, by the violence of his invective and the occasional passionateness of his animosity in his controversies with other individuals or schools of medicine, illustrates that state of war in the intellectual world of his age to which we have adverted.
Poor doctors and medical students.
We suggested the possibility that learning compared to other occupations was more remunerative in Galen’s day than in our own, but there were poor physicians and medical students then, as well as those greedy for gain or who associated with the rich. Many doctors could not afford to use the rarer or stronger simples and limited themselves to easily procured, inexpensive, and homely medicaments.[555] Many of his fellow-students regarded as a counsel of perfection unattainable by them Galen’s plan of hearing all the different medical sects and comparing their merits and testing their validity.[556] They said tearfully that this course was all very well for him with his acute genius and his wealthy father behind him, but that they lacked the money to pursue an advanced education, perhaps had already lost valuable time under unsatisfactory teachers, or felt that they did not possess the discrimination to select for themselves what was profitable from several conflicting schools.
Medical discovery in Galen’s time.
Galen was, it has already been made apparent, an intellectual aristocrat, and possessed little patience with those stupid men who never learn anything for themselves, though they see a myriad cures worked before their eyes. But that, apart from his own work, the medical profession was not entirely stagnant in his time, he admits when he asserts that many things are known to-day which had not been discovered before, and when he mentions some curative methods recently invented at Rome.[557]
The drug trade.
Galen supplies considerable information concerning the drug trade in Rome itself and throughout the empire. He often complains of adulteration and fraud. The physician must know the medicinal simples and their properties himself and be able to detect adulterated medicines, or the merchants, perfumers, and herbarii will deceive him.[558] Galen refuses to reveal the methods employed in adulterating opobalsam, which he had investigated personally, lest the evil practice spread further.[559] At Rome at least there were dealers in unguents who corresponded roughly to our druggists. Galen says there is not an unguent-dealer in Rome who is unacquainted with herbs from Crete, but he asserts that there are equally good medicinal plants growing in the very suburbs of Rome of which they are totally ignorant, and he taxes even those who prepare drugs for the emperors with the same oversight. He tells how the herbs from Crete come wrapped in cartons with the name of the herb written on the outside and sometimes the further statement that it is campestris.[560] These Roman drug stores seem not to have kept open at night, for Galen in describing a case speaks of the impossibility of procuring the medicines needed at once because “the lamps were already lighted.”[561]