The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire Hardcover – July 1, 2013
Author: Visit Amazon's Susan P. Mattern Page | Language: English | ISBN: 019976767X | Format: PDF, EPUB
The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire – July 1, 2013
Direct download links available The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire – July 1, 2013 for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
Honorable Mention, 2013 Prose Awards, Classics & Ancient History category
"This scholarly yet vivid new biography portrays a complex man, at once 'a tireless interrogator of nature, an attentive inquisitor of patients and reader of diagnostic clues' and a man who 'might be diagnosed with a personality disorder, once megalomania, today narcissism.'" -- Boston Globe
"Excellent... now the liveliest introduction to Galen in English." --Bryn Mawr Classical Review
"Confident and frequently fascinating.... [A] fine biography." --The Spectator
"[M]eticulous and engaging biography... Mattern's rigorous scholarship also unveils the rich, vivid layers of Galen's life and times, and Galen's own words paint a portrait of an astounding physician whose motivation was 'not fame or wealth' but 'the love of mankind.'" --Publishers Weekly
"An engaging biography." --Library Journal
"A well-written, well-documented biography of the single physician who dominated Western medicine for 1,300 years... A valuable resource for classics and history of medicine collections. Summing up: Recommended. All academic, general, and professional readers." --Choice
"After centuries of traditional academic studies of the works of this most influential physician of all time, we are here gifted with this full-blooded and much-needed biography of Galen the man. In every way as scholarly as previous attempts to bring his paradoxical genius to life, Prof. Mattern's enormous contribution is set within her meticulous understanding of 2nd century Rome, its medical sects, and its socio-political atmosphere. All hail to her!" --Sherwin B. Nuland, author of Doctors: The Biography of Medicine and How We Die, winner of the National Book Award
"A fascinating and lively biography of an ancient Greek doctor who settled in Rome as an imperial physician. Using much newly discovered information, Dr. Mattern sets Galen's career against the background of the Roman Empire at the height of its prosperity."
--Vivian Nutton, Emeritus Professor of the History of Medicine, University College London
"A pathologically quarrelsome physician, Galen was, in a sense, the Dr. House of Antiquity, and through his eyes Susan Mattern gives us the whole Roman world, from hovel to palace, as he treats ruptured rustics, gutted gladiators, and neurasthenic noblemen. Galen's tale is told with style and panache and due help to the reader unfamiliar with Rome--and even better than that, with plenty of enjoyably disgusting medical details." --J. E. Lendon, author of Soldiers & Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity
"It has been a while since I have read a scholarly book from cover to cover in almost one shot. Yet, Susan Mattern's The Prince of Medicine engulfed me with its subject -- which for a name like Galen's is a given -- and its enviable merits. Mattern's talent weaves a historical biography of one of the most reputed and controversial intellectual minds of antiquity into a grabbing full-life story of the real Galen, uncensored and demystified." --CJ-Online
Susan P. Mattern is Professor of History at the University of Georgia and the author of Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate, Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing, and (with Robin W. Winks) The Ancient Mediterranean World: From the Stone Age to A.D. 600.
Direct download links available for The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire – July 1, 2013
Direct download links available The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire – July 1, 2013 for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
Review
Honorable Mention, 2013 Prose Awards, Classics & Ancient History category
"This scholarly yet vivid new biography portrays a complex man, at once 'a tireless interrogator of nature, an attentive inquisitor of patients and reader of diagnostic clues' and a man who 'might be diagnosed with a personality disorder, once megalomania, today narcissism.'" -- Boston Globe
"Excellent... now the liveliest introduction to Galen in English." --Bryn Mawr Classical Review
"Confident and frequently fascinating.... [A] fine biography." --The Spectator
"[M]eticulous and engaging biography... Mattern's rigorous scholarship also unveils the rich, vivid layers of Galen's life and times, and Galen's own words paint a portrait of an astounding physician whose motivation was 'not fame or wealth' but 'the love of mankind.'" --Publishers Weekly
"An engaging biography." --Library Journal
"A well-written, well-documented biography of the single physician who dominated Western medicine for 1,300 years... A valuable resource for classics and history of medicine collections. Summing up: Recommended. All academic, general, and professional readers." --Choice
"After centuries of traditional academic studies of the works of this most influential physician of all time, we are here gifted with this full-blooded and much-needed biography of Galen the man. In every way as scholarly as previous attempts to bring his paradoxical genius to life, Prof. Mattern's enormous contribution is set within her meticulous understanding of 2nd century Rome, its medical sects, and its socio-political atmosphere. All hail to her!" --Sherwin B. Nuland, author of Doctors: The Biography of Medicine and How We Die, winner of the National Book Award
"A fascinating and lively biography of an ancient Greek doctor who settled in Rome as an imperial physician. Using much newly discovered information, Dr. Mattern sets Galen's career against the background of the Roman Empire at the height of its prosperity."
--Vivian Nutton, Emeritus Professor of the History of Medicine, University College London
"A pathologically quarrelsome physician, Galen was, in a sense, the Dr. House of Antiquity, and through his eyes Susan Mattern gives us the whole Roman world, from hovel to palace, as he treats ruptured rustics, gutted gladiators, and neurasthenic noblemen. Galen's tale is told with style and panache and due help to the reader unfamiliar with Rome--and even better than that, with plenty of enjoyably disgusting medical details." --J. E. Lendon, author of Soldiers & Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity
"It has been a while since I have read a scholarly book from cover to cover in almost one shot. Yet, Susan Mattern's The Prince of Medicine engulfed me with its subject -- which for a name like Galen's is a given -- and its enviable merits. Mattern's talent weaves a historical biography of one of the most reputed and controversial intellectual minds of antiquity into a grabbing full-life story of the real Galen, uncensored and demystified." --CJ-Online
About the Author
Susan P. Mattern is Professor of History at the University of Georgia and the author of Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate, Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing, and (with Robin W. Winks) The Ancient Mediterranean World: From the Stone Age to A.D. 600.
Direct download links available for The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire – July 1, 2013
- Hardcover: 368 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (July 1, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 019976767X
- ISBN-13: 978-0199767670
- Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #623,192 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The reader will smile with satisfaction at the arsenal of information Susan Mattern brings to the life of Galen. Whether biographical, cultural, or professional, she animates a recognizable name and converts it into a reachable personality.
We see the physician Galen as a workaholic devoted to medicine. We see him as a committed scholar, frequent lecturer, and prolific author whose work, according to Mattern, accounts for "one-eighth of all the classical Greek literature that survives." He is presented as the premier anatomist of his day (and many thousands of days to follow). And Mattern describes him as a showman reminiscent, perhaps, of some mix of Houdini and Jonathan Winters in his ability to improvise and dazzle in front of a fascinated audience watching him at work with his knife. Galen was remarkable in many other ways, including the fact that he did not accept fees but did make house calls. A physician to gladiators and to the household of Marcus Aurelius, he also ministered to the broad range of people in the street.
Galen's treatments of more than 1,800 years ago naturally puzzle today, such as directing patients to urinate on their own wounds, or using dove dung, snake flesh and other exotic substances. One wonders what specific link Galen perceived between the rub of a bug and the cure of a rash, but that was a brand of reasoning centuries down the road. Mattern says Galen's "most relevant contribution" is his "clinical practice" and that he "never lost sight of the idea that medicine is about treating patients."
This, then is a very good book. But it comes with a "tax" attached. At least 140 times, the author uses variants of the phrases "see below," "see before," or most annoying of all, "as I have mentioned.
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