Social life: food and wine.
Galen also depicts the easy-going, sociable, and pleasure-loving society of his time. Not only physicians but men generally begin the day with salutations and calls, then separate again, some to the market-place and law courts, others to watch the dancers or charioteers.[593]Others play at dice or pursue love affairs, or pass the hours at the baths or in eating and drinking or some other bodily pleasure. In the evening they all come together again at symposia which bear no resemblance to the intellectual feasts of Socrates and Plato but are mere drinking bouts. Galen had no objection, however, to the use of wine in moderation and mentions the varieties from different parts of the Mediterranean world which were especially noted for their medicinal properties.[594]He believed that drinking wine discreetly relieved the mind from all worry and melancholy and refreshed it. “For we use it every day.”[595]He affirmed that taken in moderation wine aided digestion and the blood.[596]He classed wine with such boons to humanity as medicines, “a sober and decent mode of life,” and “the study of literature and liberal disciplines.”[597]Galen’s treatise in three books on food values (De alimentorum facultatibus) supplies information concerning the ancient table and dietary science.
Allusions to Judaism and Christianity.
Galen’s allusions to Judaism and Christianity are of considerable interest. He scarcely seems to have distinguished between them. In two passages in his treatise on differences in the pulse he makes incidental allusion to the followers of Moses and Christ, in both cases speaking of them rather lightly, not to say contemptuously. In criticizing Archigenes for using vague and unintelligible language and not giving a sufficient explanation of the point in question, Galen says that it is “as if one had come to a school ofMoses and Christ and had heard undemonstrated laws.”[598]And in criticizing opposing sects for their obstinacy he remarks that it would be easier to win over the followers of Moses and Christ.[599]Later we shall speak more fully of a third passage inDe usu partium[600]where Galen criticizes the Mosaic view of the relation of God to nature, representing it as the opposite extreme to the Epicurean doctrine of a purely mechanistic and materialistic universe. This suggests that Galen had read some of the Old Testament, but he might have learned from other sources of the Dead Sea and of salts of Sodom, of which he speaks in yet another context.[601]According to a thirteenth century Arabian biographer of Galen, he spoke more favorably of Christians in a lost commentary upon Plato’sRepublic, admiring their morals and admitting their miracles.[602]This last, as we shall see, is unlikely, since Galen believed in a supreme Being who worked only through natural law. “A confection of Ioachos, the martyr or metropolitan,” and “A remedy for headache of the monk Barlama” occur in the third book of theDe remediis parabilibusascribed to Galen, but this third book is greatly interpolated or entirely spurious, citing Galen himself as well as Alexander of Tralles, the sixth century writer, and mentioning the Saracens. Wellmann regards it as composed between the seventh and eleventh centuries of our era.[603]
Galen’s monotheism.
Like most thoughtful men of his time, Galen tended to believe in one supreme deity, but he appears to have derivedthis conception from Greek rather than Hebraic sources. It was to philosophy and the Greek mysteries that he turned for revelation of the deity, as we shall see. Hopeless criminals were for him those whom neither the Muses nor Socrates could reform.[604]It is Plato, not Christ, whom in another treatise he cites as describing the first and greatest God as ungenerated and good. “And we all naturally love Him, being such as He is from eternity.”[605]
Galen’s Christian readers.
But while Galen’s monotheism cannot be regarded as of Christian or Jewish origin, it is possible that his argument from design and supporting theology by anatomy made him more acceptable to both Mohammedan and Christian readers. At any rate he had Christian readers at Rome at the opening of the third century, when a hostile controversialist complains that some of them even worship Galen.[606]These early Christian enthusiasts for natural science, who also devoted much time to Aristotle and Euclid, were finally excommunicated; but Aristotle, Euclid, and Galen were to return in triumph in medieval learning.
Four elements and four qualities.
Galen held as his fundamental theory of nature the view which was to prevail through the middle ages, that all natural objects upon this globe are composed of four elements, earth, air, fire, and water,[607]and the cognate view, which he says Hippocrates first introduced and Aristotle later demonstrated, that all natural objects are characterized by four qualities, hot, cold, dry, and moist. From the combinations of these four are produced various secondary qualities.[608]Neither hypothesis was as yet universally accepted, however, and Galen felt it incumbent upon him to argue against thosewho contended that the human body and world of nature were made from but one element.[609]There were others who ridiculed the four quality hypothesis, saying that hot and cold were words for bath-keepers, not for physicians to deal with.[610]Galen explains that philosophers do not regard any particular variety of earth or any other mineral substance as representing the pure element earth, which in the philosophical sense is an extremely cold and dry substance to which adamant and rocks make perhaps the closest approach. But the earths that we see are all compound bodies.[611]
Criticism of atomism.
Galen rejected the atomism of Democritus and Epicurus, in which the atoms were indivisible particles differing in shape and size, but not differing in quality as chemical atoms are supposed to do. He credits Democritus with the view that such qualities as color and taste are sensed by us from the concourse of atoms, but do not reside in the atoms themselves.[612]Galen also makes the criticism that the mere regrouping of “impassive and immutable” atoms is not enough to account for the new properties of the compound, which are often very different from those of the constituents, as when “we alter the qualities of medicines in artificial mixtures.”[613]Thus he virtually says that the purely physical atomism of Democritus will not account for what to-day we call chemical change. He also, as we shall see, rejected Epicurus’ theory of a world of nature ruled by blind chance.
Application of the theory of four qualities in medicine.
Galen of course thought that a dry medicine was good for a moist disease, and that in a compound medicine, by mixing a very cold with a slightly cold drug in varying proportions a medicine of any desired degree of coldness might be obtained.[614]In general he regarded solids like stones and metals as dry and cold, while he thought that hot and moist objects tended to evaporate rapidly into air.[615]So he declared that dryness of solid bodies was incurable, while he believed that children’s bodies were more easily dissolvedthan adults’ because moister and warmer.[616]The Stoics and many physicians believed that heat prolonged life, but Asclepiades pointed out that the Ethiopians are old at thirty because the hot sun dries up their bodies so, while the inhabitants of Britain sometimes live to be one hundred and twenty years old. This last, however, was regarded as probably due to the fact that their thicker skins conserved their innate heat longer.[617]
Galen’s therapeutics obsolete.
As an offset to the evidence which will be presented later of the traces of occult virtues, magic, and astrology in Galen’s therapeutics I should like to be able to indicate the good points in it. But his entire system, like the four quality theory upon which it is largely based, seems now obsolete, and what evidenced his superiority to other physicians in his own day would probably strike the modern reader only as a token of his distinct inferiority to present practice. Eighty odd years of modern medical progress since have added further emphasis to Daremberg’s declaration that we have had to throw overboard “much of his physiology, nearly all of his pathology and general therapeutics.”[618]
Some of his medical notions.
Nevertheless, we may note a few specimens which perhaps represent his ordinary theory and practice as distinguished from passages in which the influence of magic enters. He holds that bleeding and cold drink are the two chief remedies for fever.[619]He notes that children occasionally resemble their grandparents rather than their parents.[620]He disputes the assertion of Epicurus—one by which some of his followers failed to be guided—that there is no benefit to health in Aphrodite, and contends that at certain intervals and in certain individuals and circumstances sexual intercourse is beneficial.[621]His discussion of anodynes and stupor or sleep-producing medicines shows that the ancients had anaesthetics of a sort.[622]He recognized the importanceof breathing plenty of fresh, invigorating, and unpolluted air, free from any intermixture of impurity from mines, pits, or ovens, or of putridity from decaying vegetable or animal matter, or of noxious vapors from stagnant water, swamps, and rivers.[623]As was usual in ancient and medieval times, he attributes plagues to the corruption of the air, which poisons men breathing it, and tells how Hippocrates tried to allay a plague at Athens by purifying the air by fumigation with fires, odors, and unguents.[624]
Two of Galen’s cases.
Two specimens may be given of Galen’s accounts of his own cases. In the first, some cheese, which he had told his servants to take away as too sharp, when mixed with boiled salt pork and applied to the joints, proved very helpful to a gouty patient and to several others whom he induced to try it.[625]In the second case Galen administered the following heroic treatment to a woman at Rome who was afflicted with catarrh to the point of throwing up blood.[626]He did not deem it wise to bleed her, since for four days past she had gone almost without food. Instead he ordered a sharp clyster, rubbed and bound her hands and feet with a hot drug, shaved her head and put on it a medicament made of doves’ dung. After three hours she was bathed, care being taken that nothing oily touched her head, which was then covered up. At first he fed her only gruel, afterwards some bitter autumn fruit, and as she was about to go to sleep he administered a medicament made from vipers four months before. On the second day came more rubbing and binding except the head, and at evening a somewhat smaller dose of the viper remedy. Again she slept well and in the morning he gave her a large dose of cooked honey. Again her body was well rubbed and she was given barley water and a little bread to eat. On the fourth day an older and therefore stronger variety of viper-remedy was administered and her head was covered with the same medicament as before. Its properties, Galen explains, are vehemently drying and heating. Again she was given a bath and a little food. On the fifth day Galen ventured to purge her lungs, but he returned at intervals to the imposition upon her head. Meanwhile he continued the process of rubbing, bathing, and dieting, until finally the patient was well again,—a truly remarkable cure!
His power of rapid observation and inference.
These two cases, however, do not give us a just comprehension of Galen’s abilities at their best. In his medical practice he could be as quick and comprehensive an observer and as shrewd in drawing inferences from what he observed as the famous Sherlock Holmes, so that some of his slower-witted contemporaries accused him of possessing the gift of divination. His immediate diagnosis of the case of the Sicilian physician by noting as he entered the house the excrements in a vessel which a servant was carrying out to the dungheap, and as he entered the sick-room a medicine set on the window-sill which the patient-physician had been preparing for himself, amazed the patient and the philosopher Glaucon[627]more than, let us hope in this case in view of his profession, they would have amazed the estimable Dr. Watson.
His happy guesses.
Puschmann has pointed out that Galen employs certain expressions which seem happy guesses at later discoveries. He writes: “Galen was supported in his researches by an extremely happy imaginative faculty which put the proper word in his mouth even in cases where he could not possibly arrive at a full understanding of the matter,—where he could only conjecture the truth. When, for instance, he declares that sound is carried ‘like a wave’ (Kühn, III, 644), or expresses the conjecture that the constituent of the atmosphere which is important for breathing also acts by burning (IV, 687), he expresses thoughts which startle us, for it was only possible nearly two thousand years later to understand their full significance.”[628]
Tendency towards scientific measurement.
Galen was keenly alive to the need of exactness in weights and measurements. He often criticizes past writers for not stating precisely what ailment the medicament recommended is good for, and in what proportions the ingredients are to be mixed. He also frequently complains because they do not specify whether they are using the Greek or Roman system of weights, or the Attic, Alexandrine, or Ephesian variety of a certain measure.[629]Moreover, he saw the desirability of more accurate means of measuring the passage of time.[630]When he states that even some illustrious physicians of his acquaintance mistake the speed of the pulse and are unable to tell whether it is slow, fast, or normal, we begin to realize something of the difficulties under which medical practice and any sort of experimentation labored before watches were invented, and how much depended upon the accuracy of human machinery and judgment. Yet Galen estimates that the chief progress made in medical prognostication since Hippocrates is the gradual development of the art of inferring from the pulse.[631]Galen tried to improve the time-pieces in use in his age. He states that in any city the inhabitants want to know the time of day accurately, not merely conjecturally; and he gives directions how to divide the day into twelve hours by a combination of a sun-dial and aclepsydra, and how on the water clock to mark the duration of the longest, shortest, and equinoctial days of the year.[632]
Psychological tests with the pulse.
Delicate and difficult as was the task of measuring the pulse in Galen’s time, he was clever enough to anticipate by seventeen centuries some of the tests which modern psychologists have urged should be applied in criminal trials. He detected the fact that a female patient was not ill but in love by the quickening of her pulse when someone came in from the theater and announced that he had just seen Pylades dance. When she came again the next day, Galen had purposely arranged that someone should enter and say that he had seen Morphus dancing. This and a similar test on the third day produced no perceptible quickening in the woman’s pulse. But it bounded again when on the fourth day Pylades’ name was again spoken. After recounting another analogous incident where he had been able to read the patient’s mind, Galen asks why former physicians have never availed themselves of these methods. He thinks that they must have had no conception of how the bodily health in general and the pulse in particular can be affected by the “psyche’s” suffering.[633]We might then call Galen the first experimental psychologist as well as the first to elaborate the physiology of the nervous system.
Galen’s anatomy and physiology.
It would scarcely be fair to discuss Galen’s science at all without saying something of his remarkable work in anatomy and physiology. Daremberg went so far as to hold that all there is good or bad in his writings comes from good or bad physiology, and regarded his discussion of the bones and muscles as especially good.[634]He is generally considered the greatest anatomist of antiquity, but it is barely possible that he may have owed more to predecessors and contemporaries and less to personal research than is apparent from his own writings, which are the most complete anatomical treatises that have reached us from antiquity. Herophilus, for example, who was born at Chalcedon in the closing fourth century B. C. and flourished at Alexandria under the first Ptolemy, discovered the nerves and distinguished them from the sinews, and thought the brain the center of the nervous system, so that it is perhaps questionable whether Payne is justified in calling Galen “the founder of the physiology of the nervous system,” and in declaring that“in physiological diagnosis he stands alone among the ancients.”[635]However, if Galen owed something to Herophilus, we owe much of our knowledge of the earlier physiologist to Galen.[636]
Experiments in dissection.
Aristotle had held that the heart was the seat of the sensitive soul[637]and the source of nervous action, “while the brain was of secondary importance, being the coldest part of the body, devoid of blood, and having for its chief or only function to cool the heart.” Galen attacked this theory by showing experimentally that “all the nerves originated in the brain, either directly or by means of the spinal cord, which he thought to be a conducting organ merely, not a center.” “A thousand times,” he says, “I have demonstrated by dissection that the cords in the heart called nerves by Aristotle are not nerves and have no connection with nerves.” He found that sensation and movement were stopped and even the voice and breathing were affected by injuries to the brain, and that an injury to one side of the brain affected the opposite side of the body. His public demonstration by dissection, performed in the presence of various philosophers and medical men, of the connection between the brain and voice and respiration and the commentaries which he immediately afterwards dictated on this point were so convincing, he tells us fifteen years later, that no one has ventured openly to dispute them.[638]His “experimental investigation of the spinal cord by sections at different levels and by half sections was still more remarkable.”[639]Galen opposed these experimental proofs to such unscientific arguments on the part of the Stoic philosopher, Chrysippus, and others, as that the heart must be the chief organ because it is in the center of the body, or because one laysone’s hand on one’s heart to indicate oneself, or because the lips are moved in a certain way in saying “I” (ἐγώ).[640]Another noteworthy experiment by Galen was that in which, by binding up a section of the femoral artery he proved that the arteries contain blood and not air orspiritusas had been generally supposed.[641]He failed, however, to perform any experiments with the pulmonary veins, and so the notion persisted that these conveyed “spirit” and not blood from the lungs to the heart.[642]
Did Galen ever dissect human bodies?
It has usually been stated that Galen never dissected the human body and that his inferences by analogy from his dissection of animals involved him in serious error concerning human anatomy and physiology. Certainly he speaks as if opportunities to secure human cadavers or even skeletons were rare.[643]He mentions, however, the possibility of obtaining the bodies of criminals condemned to death or cast to beasts in the arena, or the corpses of robbers which lie unburied in the mountains, or the bodies of infants exposed by their parents.[644]It is not sufficient, he states in another passage,[645]to read books about human bones; one should have them before one’s eyes. Alexandria is the best place for the student to go to see actual exhibitions of this sort made by the teachers.[646]But even if one cannot go there, one may be able to procure human bones for oneself, as Galen did from a skeleton which hadbeen washed out of a grave by a flooded stream and from the corpse of a robber slain in the mountains. If one cannot get to see a human skeleton by these means or some other, he should dissect monkeys and apes.
Dissection of animals.
Indeed Galen advises the student to dissect apes in any case, in order to prepare himself for intelligent dissection of the human body, should he ever have the opportunity. From lack of such previous experience the doctors with the army of Marcus Aurelius, who dissected the body of a dead German, learned nothing except the position of the entrails. Galen at any rate dissected a great many animals. Tiny animals and insects he let alone, for the microscope was not yet discovered, but besides apes and quadrupeds he cut up many reptiles, mice, weasels, birds, and fish.[647]He also gives an amusing account of the medical men at Rome gathering to observe the dissection of an elephant in order to discover whether the heart had one or two vertices and two or three ventricles. Galen assured them beforehand that it would be found similar to the heart of any other breathing animal. This particular dissection was not, however, performed exclusively in the interests of science, since it was scarcely accomplished when the heart was carried off, not to a scientific museum, but by the imperial cooks to their master’s table.[648]Galen sometimes dissected animals the moment he killed them. Thus he observed that the lungs always sensibly shrank from the diaphragm in a dying animal, whether he killed it by suffocation in water, or strangling with a noose, or severing the spinal medulla near the first vertebrae, or cutting the large arteries or veins.[649]
Surgical operations.
Surgical operations and medical practice were a third way of learning the human anatomy, and Galen complains of the carelessness of those physicians and surgeons who do not take pains to observe it before performing an operation or cure. He himself had had one case where thehuman heart was laid bare and yet the patient recovered.[650]As a young practitioner before he came to Rome Galen worked out so successful a method of treating wounds of the sinews that the care of the health of the gladiators in his native city of Pergamum was entrusted to him by several successive pontifices[651]and he hardly lost a life. In the same passage he again speaks contemptuously of the doctors in the war with the Germans who were allowed to cut open the bodies of the barbarians but learned no more thereby than a cook would. When Galen came from Pergamum to Rome he found the professions of physicians and surgeons distinct and left cases to the latter which he before had attended to himself.[652]We may note finally that he invented a new form of surgical knife.[653]
Galen’s argument from design.
In Galen’s opinion the study of anatomy was important for the philosopher as well as for the physician. An understanding of the use of the parts of the body is helpful to the doctor, he says, but much more so to “the philosopher of medicine who strives to obtain knowledge of all nature.”[654]In theDe usu partium[655]he came to the conclusion that in the structure of any animal we have the mark of a wise workman or demiurge, and of a celestial mind; and that “the investigation of the use of the parts of the body lays the foundation of a truly scientific theology which is much greater and more precious than all medicine,” and which reveals the divinity more clearly than even the Eleusinian mysteries or Samothracian orgies. Thus Galen adopts the argument from design for the existence of God. The modern doctrine of evolution is of course subversive of his premise that the parts of the body are so well constructed for and marvelously adapted to their functions that nothing better is possible, and consequently of his conclusion that this necessitates a divine maker and planner.
In the treatiseDe foetuum formationeGalen displays a similar inclination but more tentatively and timidly. He thinks that the human body attests the wisdom and power of its maker,[656]whom he wishes the philosophers would reveal to him more clearly and tell him “whether he is some wise and powerful god.”[657]The process of the formation of the child in the womb, the complex human muscular system, the human tongue alone, seem to him so wonderful that he will not subscribe to the Epicurean denial of any all-ruling providence.[658]He thinks that nature alone cannot show such wisdom. He has, however, sought vainly from philosopher after philosopher for a satisfactory demonstration of the existence of God, and is by no means certain himself.[659]
Queries concerning the soul.
Galen is also at a loss concerning the existence and substance of the soul. He points out that puppies try to bite before their teeth come and that calves try to hook before their horns grow, as if the soul knew the use of these parts beforehand. It might be argued that the soul itself causes the parts to grow,[660]but Galen questions this, nor is he ready to accept the Platonic world-soul theory of a divine force permeating all nature.[661]It offends his instinctive piety and sense of fitness to think of the world-soul in such things as reptiles, vermin, and putrefying corpses. On the other hand, he disagrees with those who deny any innate knowledge or standards to the soul and attribute everything to sense perception and certain imaginations and memories based thereon. Some even deny the existence of the reasoning faculty, he says, and affirm that we are led by the affections of the senses like cattle. For these men courage, prudence, temperance, continence are mere names.[662]
No supernatural force in medicine.
In commenting upon the works of Hippocrates, Galen insists that in speaking of “something divine” in diseasesHippocrates could not have meant supernatural influence, which he never admits into medicine in other passages. Galen tries to explain away the expression as having reference to the effect of the surrounding air.[663]Thus while Galen might look upon nature or certain things in nature as a divine work, he would not admit any supernatural force in science or medicine, or anything bordering upon special providence. In theDe usu partiumGalen states that he agrees with Moses that “the beginning of genesis in all things generated” was “from the demiurge,” but that he does not agree with him that anything is possible with God and that God can suddenly turn a stone into a man or make a horse or cow from ashes. “In this matter our opinion and that of Plato and of others among the Greeks who have written correctly concerning natural science differs from the view of Moses.” In Galen’s view God attempts nothing contrary to nature but of all possible natural courses invariably chooses the best. Thus Galen expresses his admiration at nature’s providence in keeping the eyebrows and eyelashes of the same length and not letting them grow long like the beard or hair, but this is because a harder cartilaginous flesh is provided for them to grow in, and the mere will of God would not keep hairs from growing in soft flesh. If God had not provided the cartilaginous substance for the eyelashes, “he would have been more careless, not merely than Moses but than a worthless general who builds a wall in a swamp.”[664]As between the views on God of Moses and Epicurus, Galen prefers to steer a middle course.
Galen’s experimental instinct.
Already in describing Galen’s dissections and tests with the pulse we have seen evidence of the accurate observation and experimental instincts which accompanied his zest for hard work and zeal for truth. In one of his treatises heconfesses that it was a passion of his always to test everything for himself. “And if anyone accuses me of this, I will confess my disease, from which I have suffered all my life long, that I have trusted no one of those who narrate such things until I have tested it myself, if it was possible for me to have experience of it.”[665]Galen also recognized that general theories were not sufficient for exact knowledge and that specific examples seen with one’s own eyes were indispensable.[666]He maintains that, if all teachers and writers would realize and observe this, they would make comparatively few false statements. He saw the danger of making absolute assertions and the need of noting the particular circumstances of each individual case.[667]Galen more than once declared that things, not names, were important and refused to waste time in disputing about terminology and definitions which might be spent in “pursuing the knowledge of things themselves.”[668]Thus we see in Galen a pragmatic scientist intent upon concrete facts and exact knowledge; but at the same time it must be recognized that he accepted some universal theorems and general views.
Attitude towards authorities.
Galen did not believe in merely repeating in new books the statements of previous authorities. Ever since boyhood, he writes in hisAnatomical Administrations, it has seemed to him that one should record in writing only one’s new discoveries and not repeat what has been said already.[669]Nevertheless in some of his writings he collects the prescriptions of past physicians at great length, and a previous treatise by Archigenes is practically embodied in one of Galen’s works on compound medicines. On another occasion, however, after stating that Crito had combined previous treatises upon cosmetics, including the work of Cleopatra, into four books of his own which constitute a well-nigh exhaustive treatment of the subject, Galen says thathe sees no profit in copying Crito’s work again and merely reproduces its table of contents.[670]On the other hand, as this passage shows, Galen thought that the ancients had stated many things admirably and he had little patience with contemporaries who would learn nothing from them but were always ambitiously weaving new and complicated dogmas, or misinterpreting and perverting the teachings of the ancients.[671]His method was rather first to “make haste and stretch every nerve to learn what the most celebrated of the ancients have said;”[672]then, having mastered this teaching, to judge it and put it to the test for a long time and determine by observation how much of it agrees and how much disagrees with actual phenomena, and then embrace the former portion and reject the latter.
Adverse criticism of past writers.
This critical employment of past authorities is frequently illustrated in Galen’s works. He mentions a great many names of past physicians and writers, thereby shedding some light upon the history of Greek medicine; but at times he criticizes his predecessors, not sparing even Empedocles and Aristotle. Although he cites Aristotle a great deal, he declares that it is not surprising that Aristotle made many errors in the anatomy of animals, since he thought that the heart in large animals had a third ventricle.[673]As we have already seen in discussing the topic of weights and measurements, Galen especially objects to the vagueness and inaccuracy of many past medical writers,[674]or praises individuals like Heras who give specific information.[675]He also shows a preference for writers who give first-hand information, commending Heraclides of Tarentum as a trustworthy man, if there ever was one, who set down only those things proved by his own experience.[676]Galen declares that one could spend a lifetime in reading the books that have already been written upon medicinal simples. He urges his readers, however, to abstain from Andreas andother liars of that stamp, and above all to eschew Pamphilus who never saw even in a dream the herbs which he describes.
Galen’s estimate of Dioscorides.
Of all previous writers uponmateria medicaGalen preferred Dioscorides. He writes, “But Anazarbensis Dioscorides in five books discussed all useful material not only of herbs but of trees and fruits and juices and liquors, treating besides both all metals and the parts of animals.”[677]Yet he does not hesitate to criticize certain statements of Dioscorides, such as the story of mixing goat’s blood with theterra sigillataof Lemnos. Dioscorides had also attributed marvelous virtues to the stone Gagates which he said came from a river of that name in Lycia; Galen’s comment is that he has skirted the entire coast of Lycia in a small boat and found no such stream.[678]He also wonders that Dioscorides described butter as made of the milk of sheep and goats, and correctly states that “this drug” is made from cows’ milk.[679]Galen does not mention its use as a food in his work on medicinal simples, and in his treatise upon food values he alludes to butter rather incidentally in the chapter on milk, stating that it is a fatty substance and easily recognized by tasting it, that it has many of the properties of oil, and in cold countries is sometimes used in baths in place of oil.[680]Galen further criticizes Dioscorides for his unfamiliarity with the Greek language and consequent failure to grasp the significance of many Greek names.
Galen’s dogmatism: logic and experience.
Daremberg said of Galen that he represented at the same time the most exaggerated dogmatism and the most advanced experimental school. There is some justification for the paradox, though the latter part seems to me the truer. But Galen was proud of his training in philosophy and logic and mathematics; he stood fast by many Hippocratic dogmas such as the four qualities theory, he thought[681]that in medicine as in geometry there were a certain number of self-evident maxims upon which reason, conforming to the rules of logic, might build up a scientific structure. In theDe methodo medendi[682]he makes a distinction between the discovery of drugs and medicines, simple or compound, by experience and the methodical treatment of disease which he now sets forth and which should proceed logically and independently of mere empiricism, and he wishes that other medical writers would make it clear when they are relying merely on experience and when exclusively upon reason.[683]At the same time he expresses his dislike for mere dogmatizers who shout theiripse dixitslike tyrants without the support either of reason or experience.[684]He also grants that the ordinary man, taught by nature alone, often instinctively pursues a better course of action for his health than “the sophists” are able to advise.[685]Indeed, he is of the opinion that some doctors would do well to stick to experience alone and not try to mix in reasoning, since they are not trained in logic, and when they endeavor to divide or analyze a theme, perform like unskilled carvers who fail to find the joints and mutilate the roast.[686]Later on in the same work[687]he again affirms that persons who will not read and profit by the books of medical authorities and whose own reasoning is defective, should limit themselves to experience.